Rep. Cy Thao's Art Exhibition
Charlie
Mary Abbe, Star Tribune
May 30, 2004ART0530
Wiry, intense, incredibly hard-working and gifted with an infectious
laugh, Minnesota legislator and artist Cy Thao has accomplished more
in his 32 years than many Americans aspire to in their lifetimes.
Through his unlikely career choices -- politician and painter -- he
has found a means to help his people and to tell the story of the
culture they left behind.
When he arrived with his family in the United States in 1980, Thao was
an 8-year-old Hmong boy who spoke no English. His story of refugee
camps, resettlement, hard work and embrace of American life is a
familiar one among refugees who fled Laos after the United States
abandoned neighboring Vietnam in 1975.
In 2002, Thao became the second Hmong elected to the Minnesota
legislature, winning 81 percent of the votes for a seat as the DFL
representative from the Frogtown neighborhood of St. Paul. This month
he became the first Hmong artist to have a solo show at the
Minneapolis Institute of Arts, where his series of 50 paintings, "The
Hmong Migration," runs through July 11.
Artist and legislator Cy ThaoJoey McleisterStar Tribune"When I
graduated [from the University of Minnesota in Morris] in 1995, I
wrote a goal that within five years I was going to have a show at
either the Walker or the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, so I just
missed by four years," Thao said recently, beaming with pleasure as he
stood surrounded by his colorful paintings at the museum. "At the time
I had read or heard that guys like Lee Iacocca or Eddie Murphy set
achievable personal goals for themselves and this seemed simple, but
achievable."
Gallery: Images from Cy Thao's "The Hmong Migration"Simple to
imagine, perhaps, but not easy to execute. While many of the paintings
are informed by his family's refugee experiences, the series has a
larger historical scope. He worked on them for more than six years,
during which he also won fellowships from the Bush and Jerome
foundations that helped with living expenses and provided travel money
for research. He traced the history of the Hmong at sites in China,
Laos and Thailand in 1999, taking his father, Nhia Yong Thao, along as
translator.
"I didn't speak Lao or Thai, and I needed my dad to start the journey
for me," he said.
Unlike many Hmong families who lost members in the post-war chaos,
Thao's parents and their eight children arrived in the United States
together; a ninth child was born here. A farmer and provincial
governor in Laos, Nhia Yong Thao also worked with the CIA during the
Vietnam War, as did many Hmong. In 1975, the senior Thao and his
family fled to Thailand, where they spent five years in refugee camps
before gaining permission to come to the United States. They settled
in St. Paul.
Thao recalls his family's story candidly, without bitterness or
sentiment.
"Because he was a government official, he had the paperwork" to get us
out of Laos, Thao said of his father. "He hired smugglers to get us
across the river, but we couldn't go together because there were too
many. My brother, who was 7, and sister, 5, went first. I went by
myself. I was nearly 3. I still remember the boat and the man who took
me. The guy took me to a house and I remember playing with another
boy. The next day they took me to a road and a bus came. They put me
on the bus and at the back was my mom and two younger brothers. They
took us to the refugee camp, and dad showed up a week later."
Three more children were born in the camp, and all survived, although
one sister is "developmentally slower and her growth is stunted,"
because of illness contracted in the camp, he said.
"I knew there was death all the time because when someone passes away,
we play a huge drum, and every night there were two or three drums
that you would hear across the whole camp," Thao said.
Art became important to him in the United States when he realized that
he could use drawings to compensate for his lack of English.
"I would give my drawings to other kids, and that was how we became
friends," he said. "So I learned at an early age how to use art to
communicate."
Hmong history in pictures
In colorful narrative images, Thao's 50 paintings detail 5,000 years
of Hmong history, culture and customs beginning with an imaginative
creation myth and a flood legend, continuing through centuries of
strife and persecution in China, oppression by the French in Laos and
fighting for the Americans against the communists in a 15-year "secret
war" run by the CIA.
The last half of the series recounts, in often graphic detail,
massacres, genocide, brutal clan rivalries, perilous river crossings,
camp privations and the difficulties and disappointments of life in
the new "land of uncertainty, confusion and fear," as he describes the
America that refugees encountered. One scene alludes to killings among
teenage Hmong gangs and another to the suicides of older Hmong and the
despair that drove a Hmong mother to kill her children.
When he started the series, Thao said, he didn't know much about Hmong
history. Centuries of displacement and the absence of a written
language left the Hmong dependent on transmitting their history and
culture through stories and picture, including the elaborate
embroidered "story cloths" that Hmong women made even in the refugee
camps. His paintings continue those traditions in another format. Each
painting is accompanied by a brief story highlighting bits of history,
which Thao added after an encounter with the paintings of
African-American artist Jacob Lawrence.
Lawrence is most famous for a painting series known as The Great
Migration that recounts the exodus of black Americans from the South a
century ago. While he was working on his own migration series, Thao
saw at the MIA a show of Lawrence's paintings and texts telling the
stories of black heroes Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglas.
"I was maybe halfway through my series when I saw his stuff, and it
reminded me of my own paintings," Thao said. "At that time I was
struggling because I had not decided to put writing with them, but
friends would ask me questions. I know it's spoon-feeding, but I think
the viewer gets a deeper understanding and feeling if they read about
it as well."
Despite some horrific scenes, there is a brisk pace to the series that
gives it an epic, rather upbeat sweep. It is mostly a generic history
of the Hmong, rather than a tale studded with individual heroes as is
typical in European or American history painting. One painting of four
fighter planes, however, is accompanied by the story of Lee Lue, "the
fearless Hmong pilot" who distinguished himself during the secret war
by flying more than 500 missions before he was shot down.
For centuries, most Hmong were farmers, so there are many bucolic
images of peasants carrying water, tending fields and feeding animals.
Chickens scratch the dirt and cartoon-style pigs root about, seemingly
oblivious of the human drama around them. The series ends on a
positive note with depictions of a "Hmong Pride" parade, new festivals
to preserve traditional ways, and a shopping mall bursting with Hmong
businesses -- including a Thao Art Gallery and a billboard announcing
his political candidacy.
"I'm just thrilled by this show, both its incredible narrative and its
style and the tough story that he tells with such clarity and
feeling," said museum director Evan Maurer, who stopped in to greet
Thao, whom he met when they served together on an arts panel several
years ago.
Thao's painting technique evolved as his series expanded. Starting in
1996 with a raw, emotionally loaded and highly detailed folk-art
style, he gradually changed to a simpler, almost childlike approach
with shifting points of view and strangely sized figures. Some scenes
have traditional European perspective with distant objects smaller
than those in the foreground. Others are given a medieval treatment in
which characters' sizes reflect their significance, as when a guard
about to shoot a refugee looms larger than the camp's guard tower.
Many have aerial perspectives common to Japanese art.
Having studied art (and political science) in college, Thao found that
his hardest decisions were stylistic, "when to make it look like it's
trained, and when to let it all out and just paint," he said.
Some of the agrarian images have sly, double-edged political
implications, too. One of the prettiest paintings shows an attractive
woman in a field of tall green plants that stretches to the horizon, a
kind of folk-art version of a Monet landscape. Gardeners and students
of French colonial history will immediately recognize the plants as
opium poppies. As Thao explains in an accompanying text panel, "When
collecting taxes the French preferred opium to cash."
Politics and art
Having grown up poor in a family that was for five years dependent on
welfare, Thao is grateful for and fiercely protective of the
government social services that helped his people gain a foothold in
the United States. As a legislator, he has tried to get the federal
government to extend veterans benefits to the immigrant Hmong soldiers
who fought alongside U.S. troops. As an artist he has tried to record
their fast-fading stories.
"So now you start to see my art work and my political life coming
together," he said.
As for the future, he expects that within a few generations the Hmong,
too, will have melted into their new culture. His 3-year-old daughter
replies in English when he talks to her in Hmong.
"We will be 'Asian-Americans' -- can't do anything about it," he said,
laughing ruefully at the generic term. "The most I can do is paint
pictures of who we are and how we got here, and hopefully that will
give them some glimpse of who they were."
IF YOU GO
The Hmong Migration
What: Fifty paintings by artist and Minnesota legislator Cy Thao
recounting 5,000 years of Hmong history, including Vietnam-era
atrocities in Laos and recent events in the Twin Cities.
When: Thru July 11.
Where: Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 2400 3rd Av. S., Mpls.
Tickets: Free. 612-870-3131.
CY THAO
Born: 1972, Laos.
Family: Wife, Lee Vang, director, the Center for Hmong Arts and Talent
in St. Paul; daughter Cyanne, 3; baby due in July.
Education: B.A. in studio art and political science from the
University of Minnesota, Morris, 1995. University of St. Thomas,
education degree.
Career: Second Hmong elected to Minnesota legislature, DFL party
representative from District 65A (St. Paul), November 2002. Taught in
Minneapolis public schools and worked as actor and art instructor.
Co-founder of Community Action Against Racism.
Awards and Honors: Bush Foundation artist fellowship; Jerome
Foundation travel grant; Minnesota State Arts Board fellowship; St.
Paul Companies Leadership and Initiative in the Neighborhood grant.
Recent achievements: First Hmong artist to have solo show at
Minneapolis Institute of Arts.
Mary Abbe is at ma...@startribune.com.
Moobsib
ntes qe ntawd kawg. She is good looking naked. hehehehehehe...
ms
M. M. Lee
yog kawg li lawm. It's amazing how much Cy's art resemble the Hmong
women's paj ntaub story cloths that we have seen for 30 years. I would
say these Hmong women craft workers have really influenced Cy Thao's
growth as an artist. [Although it should be noted that these women
keep their subjects clothed most of the time.] I guess we Hmong women
are the premier artists in our society after all, eh? Talking about
Hmong firsts. The women lead the way with many beautiful exhibits of
their art in museums across the globe before a Hmong man comes along.
It is sad many of these women never got the credit because they don't
sign their names to their beautiful work which takes months and months
to produce just one piece, one stitch at a time.
-M
paajd...@yahoo.com (Moobsib) wrote in message news:<818ff16c.04053...@posting.google.com>...
Brandon Thao
fighting for what is right for all. Things like this deserve praises
as opposed to criticisms, which some people are very good at and are
only good at.
--Brandon.
charli...@yahoo.com (Charlie) wrote in message news:<bd1cd63a.04052...@posting.google.com>...
Anti
li thiab lam tau lam hais lus li ib tug me nyuam yaus ruam li mainas
thiab. Cy thao yog ib tug neeg quav cawv heev li thiaj li ua rau nws
lub hlwb tsis zoo lawm nws thiaj li hais lus li tus ruam thiab luag li
ib tug ruam.
cy thoj cov art ces zoo li me nyuam yaus paint xwb thiab tsis tas li
tseem mus paint tias hmoob rov muab hmoob tua vim ib co hmoob raug
liam mus pab nyab laj es ho tsis paint txog tej uas nyab laj muab
hmoob tua thiab raug mos. tsis hais txog lwm haiv neeg ua phem rau yus
hos ho mus paint hais txog hmoob rov tua hmoob qhov ua rau cy thoj yog
ib tub hmoob ruam thiab tsis hlub hmoob.
cy thoj nrog ib tug me nyuam yaus debate xyov puas tseem yuav yeej
thiab vim nws lub hlwb tsis tshua zoo lawm.
amen
wac...@hotmail.com (Brandon Thao) wrote in message news:<8445f4d6.04060...@posting.google.com>...