New Art Examiner
April, 1987
Other Horizons
On tradition and transition
Hmong art confronts America
by Claire Wolf Krantz
The "'Primitivism' in 20th Century Art" exhibit held at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1984 stimulated a renewed interest in the art and artifacts of tribal cultures. Responses to the show exposed many of the myths that have conditioned our responses to them. Today, as Western culture seems to mourn its lack of a shared symbolic order, it persists in seeing tribal art as somehow purer, more authentic than Western cultural production. Onto tribal art we project all our unfulfilled romantic longings for cultural unity and spiritual wholeness.
At a given moment, any number of exhibits of non-Western art -- such a s the 1984 exhibit "Art of the Aztec Mexico: Treasure of Tenochtitlan" at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. -- are to be found in museums across the country. Another significant group of artifacts which is recently being exposed to Western art world scrutiny are produced by the Hmong, a tribal group now immigrating to the United States from their homelands in the high, remote mountains of northern Laos.
The Hmong's existence was largely unknown to the Western art establishment before 1980, but exhibits of this culture's art work began to spring up around the country in the last few years. The Kresge Art Museum at Michigan State University held and exhibition in 1984 and, in Chicago, the Beacon Street Gallery and the Gruen Gallery held exhibitions with sales of work in that same year. In addition, Hmong entrepreneurs have been selling newly made textiles at art fairs, church bazaars, and gift shops.
Perhaps the most ambitious effort to date is the exhibition of Hmong art organized by the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, seen by this writer at the Chicago Public Library Cultural Center in late 1985. Pervaded by a more anthropological approach to the work, the show was accompanied by an excellent catalogue edited by Joanne Cubbs and comprised Hmong costumes, jewelry, musical instruments, and other objects in a display that also included some contextual material. Although the bulk of this large exhibit was devoted to the traditional arts, some newer pieces were displayed, emphasizing the changes which occurred following Hmong exposure to the West.
The Hmong's origins date back 5,000 years to what is now central China. A minority group with a history of insularity, they have always jealously guarded their language, rituals, cultural identity, and production. In northern Laos, where the majority of them lived until recently, they were able to shape an independent, self-sufficient existence that revolved around farming, raising livestock, hunting, and cultivating opium poppies. A distinctive part of the Hmong’s cultural heritage is the beautiful and unusual textiles, which have helped them, form and keep a strong ethnic identity.
Refusing to integrate into the dominant cultures surrounding them, the Hmong have sporadically been subjected to persecution and banishment from their lands. As a people, the Hmong are survivors. Sometimes likened to the Jews in Diaspora, they have managed to migrate to new lands when necessary for their economic and cultural survival, migration that eventually let them to the higher mountain ranges of Indochina and southwest China.
In the 1960s, political unrest in Indochina escalated once again into war. Caught in the fighting between communists and the Royal Laotian Government, some Hmong families were recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency to help the American-backed government. Although some Hmong sided with Pathet Lao and were later rewarded with positions of power when the communist Pathet Lao took over Laos in 1975, their traditional way of life was not respected. Today the communists continue to persecute those minority peoples who resist total integration into the larger social community by continuing traditional practices. Fearing reprisals and persecutions, large numbers of the Hmong fled to Thailand, where they lived in camps until their eventual relocation to Canada, Australia, France, and the United States.
Missionaries stationed in these refugee camps -- working toward the larger goals of Hmong assimilation into modern Western society - recognized the group's craft making heritage as a vital resource. Just as with the American Indians 100 years ago, they saw the Hmong handicraft tradition as potentially income-producing and began to purchase Hmong textiles and set up systems of export for sale abroad. Initially tourists in Thailand expressed interest in the work as did collectors in the United States who responded to both traditional work and newer forms. Meanwhile, the missionaries encouraged the Hmong to design items that would particularly appeal to their Western customers. Thus, a craft industry was born, and designs and objects that were previously made for use and symbolic value emerged as marketable commodities.
The importance accorded objects used in everyday life -- clothing, jewelry, hats, purses, etc. -- is reflected by the beauty and craftsmanship the Hmong lend to these items. They function in one sense as symbols of social status: traditionally, Hmong artifacts have no exchange value, but instead carry a strong social value in the culture. Antiques, for example, are not precious because of their age but due to their associations with the ancestor who made them, just as well-made objects accrue respect for a family whose skill and industry enabled them to amass handsome pieces. An object's beauty increases this value -- in terms of individual pleasure, the acquisition of familial respect, and the beauty that it imparts to its owner or wearer. According to Pah Yang, a young Hmong Chicagoan, a woman's pleasure in wearing beautiful clothes partially lies in knowing she deserves them.
Hmong objects also function as ethnic markers for particular subgroups or clans, with the motifs serving decorative as well as symbolic purposes. Decoration is integral to their fabrication and use and usually consists of geometric designs -- triangles, spirals, circles, zigzags, and dots -- often covering the entire surface of the item and comprising colored patters of appliqué and reverse appliqué, batik-dyed sections, and tiny embroidery stitches such as the cross stitch. Generally the motifs have names referring to their meanings, with the meanings varying with each clan or subgroup. Colors, too, communicate symbolic meanings, as well as signifying decorative preferences, which can vary from clan to clan. Hmong textiles thereby extend the cultural identity and integration of a community: one textile can function as a talisman, another can provide symbolic support and information about the owner.
The Hmong emphasis on encouraging creativity in the fabrication of functional objects and for the purposes of extending cultural identity has permitted them some aesthetic flexibility and adaptability. The Hmong see no conflict between the old and the new, and attitude seen in the fact that an aesthetic of the "handmade" is foreign to them. The Hmong have always used available materials to fit into their sensibility of bright colors and complex design motifs. When brightly colored, industrially woven and dyed materials because available, Hmong women began to incorporate them into their designs. The aesthetic use of silver in jewelry making is similar to that of aluminum from refuse in the refugee camps, which was transformed into intricately looped and chained necklaces. In addition, the new Hmong practices of fabricating items for sale does not preclude the ongoing making of traditional articles for home use; in fact, it helps to keep the practice of needlework alive in the face of conflicting new values and demands on time. The Hmong have always persevered to ear a living; if their textiles can augment their earnings that is all to the good. In answer to a common Western fear that a traditional aesthetic will be diluted, the Hmong regard their neither aesthetic as neither static nor prescriptive, and take a more relaxed attitude about aesthetic changes.
The Hmong items made for sales do differ from those made for home use and include pillows, purses, bedcovers, tablecloths, and belts. These newer items made for sale incorporate new combinations of old geometric motifs in both traditional color combinations -- which often employ vivid colors -- and the more muted tones preferred by Westerners. The most popular and innovative new item is the story cloth: a square or rectangular "picture" meant to be hung on the wall. Here, for the first time, naturalistically drawn figurative motifs -- plants, flowers, animals, houses, trees, and people -- appear. These pictures record stories of everyday events and legends. Earlier ones were hierarchically ordered bands of fairly static figures, almost like friezes, stacked vertically, while later on the bands of figures began to include environmental elements and their placement on the piece of cloth opened up. Elements of perspective have appeared in the ordering of space, and words have been added to the narrative: titles, elements of stories, names, dates, and signatures.
The amazing needlework skills of the Hmong, as well as their ability to abstract essential form to create design motifs, then, have begun to shift into an expanded field: that of literature and narrative. The story cloths are expressive and delightful, although they sometimes carry a painful message (no less than their traditional funeral cloths). They are especially poignant documents of present-day history, an addition to their legacy of cultural preservation through story and song.
These aesthetic transformations, while ongoing and relatively rapid, are not smooth, nor has their direction been predictable. Preferring higher-paying factory jobs, many Hmong have given up the practice of needlework. Today, men, who never did needlework in the past, occasionally involve themselves in the process - either by drawing the figures or letters or by actually learning the skill itself. Some of the quality of the actual stitchery has deteriorated, partially reflecting the American preference for patterns more simple and less intricate than traditional work, and also partially reflecting the comparative lack of stitchery expertise of the younger people and men newly engaged in it. While some items that would never be used by the Hmong themselves can now find a market among less knowledgeable Western consumers, much of contemporary Hmong stitchery retains its complexity and quality.
New influences from the West are sharply different from those of Eastern cultures and mountainous isolation. But the Hmong's ability to translate ideas into material form, and to deal with the complexities of abstract forms and designs and color relationships, are not dependent upon traditional ideas, forms, or materials. The fact that their cultural activities are so integral to their daily lives seems to impart a force to their artwork which it is hoped will continue. The story cloths are a prime example of Hmong adaptability. Hmong stitchery always related symbolically to its owner; now it incorporates new motifs to relive their past and describe their present lives, as well as to fulfill new material needs and redefine Hmong cultural identity in a new land.
This ability of the Hmong and other tribal groups to integrate creative activities into the substance of life is missing from Today's Western culture. Our unparalleled opportunity for interaction with individuals within these cultures -- due to recent immigration to the United States -- can broaden our understanding of, and appreciation for, the value of creative activity and its products.
The fundamental commonality of values and relative slowness of change in cultures such as the Hmong's does not in fact imply, as we would like to think, a total absence of dissension from the norm, no difference, no change. We label older work from cultures during periods of stability as authentic and value them because we invest them with our need to return to a supposedly unified, predictable wholeness. Those objects, which are made by a culture in transition and are responding to new stimuli and pressures -- are seen by Westerners as somehow less authentic and of lesser value; and we often contribute to their inauthenticity and devaluation by encouraging the fabrication of "traditional" objects, whether or not these forms continue to have meaning for their makers.
Most important, removing artifacts from traditional cultures from the sphere of "serious" art is an effective political tool, which contributes to these cultures' isolation, powerlessness, and lack of self-respect. By supporting certain aspect of cultures, either with respect or money, we place these cultures in the trap of trying to retain or regain a purity and essence which in fact may never have existed. Since we cannot stop our time, we try to stop theirs. Or, when they do insist on their right to change, we interfere by setting our own standards as models for the best way to live and to work and to make art. Within the Western cultural domain, what we choose to focus on as serious, essential, and important is given access and respect. What we set aside from serious consideration, by whatever means, becomes ignored, peripheral, and unable to exert influence and power.
Hmong art is changing faster than it used to. We cannot participate in their culture, nor do we have the right to judge how they participate in ours; yet their new solutions could enrich all of us, expanding both the definitions of art and its place in society.
Claire Wolf Krantz is an artist, freelance critic, and guest curator.
As an artist she works in a combination of painting and photography as well as digitally created images.