Border Patrol
First generation Hmong-American artist Song Thao self-consciously works a gray area between Hmong and western traditions. Is the emerging graduate student working out meaningful syntheses, or, in refusing to choose a single idiom, is Thao bound to fall between the cracks?
Full disclosure: Song Thao is a former student of co-editor Christina Schmid. And now I’m going to tell you something I’m not professionally obligated to say: when I went to see Thao, I didn’t get the interview I wanted. I had gone on a tip about the commodification of ethnicity, about the contradictory institutional pressures that Thao was facing upon presenting his work to his instructors and advisers.
But when I met Thao, I didn’t get that controversial interview. It may be that Thao is shrewdly avoiding creating nuisance for those who have to graduate him, but I felt that something even more mature was going on. Realizing that he is, himself, integrating and trading on traditions, Thao is taking as his own burden the argument for his work’s significance. This clouds any controversy, blurring it into periphery. Thao’s gaze is fixed forward, on the work. He is dedicated to his craft, articulate and serious-minded.
Thao thinks about traditions, about contradictions, and he comprehends the struggle of making work that is both meaningful to traditional Hmong people and relevant to the contemporary Western art environment that has embraced him. He quickly points out to me that the Center for Hmong Arts and Talent (CHAT) has dubbed its yearly art festival “No Word For Art”, in defiance of their native tongue’s own deficit.
Surprisingly, he does not aim to tear down this conception, which strikes me as a confusion of word and concept. “The idea of working as an artist is new to the Hmong community and elders,” he says. Hmong life in their native culture was semi-nomadic. Life was hard. Items had to prove their utility or be left behind.
Now in the United States, the traditional culture extends that utilitarianism to its youth. “When you are the oldest child in a family, you have a large responsibility to help,” says Thao. The pressure to enter a prestigious field – say medicine or law – is palpable. Thao characterizes his reception by Hmong elders and community leaders with the following quote from his seven-year-old niece: “Uncle, why do you do scribbles?”
Thao’s first forays into the Western art idiom were also met with incomprehension. As a student at Gustavus Adolphus, he was inspired by Dali, and he loved to create surrealistic portraits. But when he tried to infuse his surrealistic portraits with Hmong culture, the complex symbolism of the paintings was illegible to his instructors, and Thao got tired of doing “figural stuff.”
As he ventured into the abstract expressionism, Thao was immediately encouraged by instructors. They pushed him toward the MCAD graduate program. The reception confirmed for Thao that his instructors had not understood his earlier work.
Thao’s current work mixes the formal characteristics of abstract expressionism – color as feeling and line as motion – with elements from the tradition of Hmong story cloth. The first of these experiments to go up for institutional review was met with the same incomprehension that marked his reception in the Hmong community. The piece was boldly bordered with colorful margins that emulated those on a storycloth, but no one seemed to notice. “They ignored the border, as though it was just matting, and focused on the middle of the piece. They asked me, ‘How do you intend to make this more contemporary.’”
Thao felt as though he had been accused of imitating Jackson Pollock a half century too late. Accustomed to swimming against cultural tides, however, Thao seems incapable of defensiveness or despair. He does not seem to want to be reminded how many great artists were misunderstood in their time, nor to be praised for some rote hybridization of cultural influences. He simply returns to the canvases – to line, to ink, to paint, and to find inspiration. Still working the quilted geometry on a grand scale, Thao mixes elements like an alchemist. More splatter, more line, less border, more border. As the diligent painter observes the intersections of his idioms, his own visual language starts to emerge.
Yet it is still unclear: will Thao’s work produce the kind of synthesis that captivates a larger audience? In trying to fuse an overdetermined Western art practice to a culture that has no word for art, is he bound to slip into a category of ethnographic representation? Or to make art that means many things to no one? Or is Thao making work that is only conscious of the limited experience of Hmong-Americans, and that does not present that experience in a way that is universal or humanistic?
These are the questions that will shape the next years of Thao’s career. A few things that are clear, however: Thao is a serious artist who does not demand to be taken seriously. His modest commitment to craft and art seems inimical to egotism and grand pretensions. But he shows the perseverance in continuing to tweak his work, to resist explanation and defensiveness in his presentation, and look for something that is meaningful in itself.
Image List
1) Song Thao, Burning in a Room. 40″ x 55″. 2010. Acrylic, ink and watercolor on synthetic paper.
2) Song Thao, Muting the World. 50″ x 50″. 2010. Acrylic and ink on synthetic paper.
3) Song Thao, Running in Circles. 59″x96″. 2010. Acrylic, ink and watercolor on synthetic paper.
4) Song Thao, On the Boundary. 20″x55″. 2010. Oil and watercolor on synthetic paper.
With such depth of maturity so early in his career, keep your eye on this artist!