How do artists document community life and histories?
Introduction
As social creatures, we human beings often see ourselves as members of various communities. But what is the actual definition of “community”? This question becomes more challenging as global migration continues to bring new people together to forge new communities.
Communities can be found in all kinds of settings and are often associated with places of gathering such as schools or houses of worship. But ultimately, communities are defined by the people who comprise them—their shared sense of identity, belonging, experience, and history.
Every generation has its own way of forming community and documenting its values and traditions. Artists like Pao Houa Her and Martin Wong represent and reflect in their own way, sharing the stories of the cultural lives of their communities.
Pao Houa Her
Pao Houa Her was born in 1982 in northern Laos. Her’s family fled to the refugee camps in Thailand when she was a baby, and they arrived in St. Paul, Minnesota, in the mid-1980s. In 2012, Her was the first Hmong artist to receive an MFA in photography at Yale University. She uses portrait and still-life photography to shed light on the complexities of the Hmong American experience and the humanity of Hmong refugee populations in the United States. The series After the Fall of Hmong Teb Chaw explores the little-known events that have impacted her native Hmong community. The Hmong, an ethnic group indigenous to Laos, aided American forces in fighting the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam War.
© Pao Houa Her.
In the aftermath of the war, many Hmong fled Laos for cities in the United States. Hmong teb chaw (pronounced “tey-chow”)—or Hmong “country”—refers both to this original loss of a Hmong homeland, but also to a recent incident in the Twin Cities when more than four hundred Hmong elders were deceived into investing in a fraudulent scheme of the same name. The now-convicted con man, Seng Xiong, convinced elders to invest payments of three to five thousand dollars in exchange for land, a home, and other benefits in a future Southeast Asian country to be established as a new Hmong nation-state. The fallout from the scheme revealed the generational divide between those who remember living in Laos and hope to return and younger generations who were born and raised in the United States. Her points out, “In my community, some have a real need and longing for Laos. It’s a longing I think my generation doesn’t have because we weren’t born there or raised there.”
Pao Houa Her’s digital photographs capture her subjects against backdrops that conceal the setting—a center for Hmong elders in Minnesota. The portraits are paired with photographs of the Como Park Conservatory in St. Paul, where lush, tropical plants from Southeast Asia have also been transplanted. She strategically uses shadows and contrast in her black-and-white prints to temporarily fool the audience’s eyes into believing these environments are real. In After the Fall, the environment is artificial, but the yearning and hope of the Hmong elders are real.
Video: Pao Her: artist profile
Video Discussion
Pao Houa Her tells Hmong history through her photographs. She makes work based on her lived experience—things she has experienced, seen, heard in her community. Her interest in storytelling lead her to create portraits of Hmong veterans who fought in the Vietnam war, but were not recognized by the United States army.
What are your main takeaways from Pao Houa Her’s interview and artwork?
As you watch Pao Her’s video, make note of the conflicts she mentions. What are some of the conflicts the Hmong community must deal with because of the United States military’s failure to recognize Hmong fighters? How does Her express these conflicts in her photographs? What conflicts in your own family’s or culture’s history might you like to learn more about in order to better understand it/them?
What are some of the tropes in portraiture she adapts to make these photographs?
What do you think Pao Houa Her means when she asks “how can I give some of the power I have back to them?"
Martin Wong
Martin Wong (1946–1999) was born in Portland, Oregon—a son of Chinese immigrant parents— and grew up in San Francisco’s Chinatown neighborhood. A trained ceramist and self-taught painter, he moved to New York City in 1978 to further pursue his career as an artist. There he became a prominent figure in the arts community of the Lower East Side. Wong’s artworks are a blend of social and visionary realism, capturing the daily life he observed in the ethnically diverse, urban neighborhoods he lived in. Wong himself said, “Everything I paint is within four blocks of where I live and the people are the people I know and see all the time.” You can explore more of Martin Wong's work and biography here on Visual AIDS' website.
© 2020 the Estate of Martin Wong and P·P·O·W, New York. Photo: Peter Bellamy, 1985.
In his painting Polaris, Wong paints eight children seated in a circle, playing a game of marbles. The work’s title refers to the star Polaris, the North Star, which serves as a guide for navigation and astronomy because of its nearly direct alignment with the North Pole. This seemingly mundane scene of children playing a game together may have been something Wong observed in his own life, but the blue background of constellations gives the painting a cosmic feel that transcends daily life on Earth. Stars and constellations have helped humans find our way through the world since prehistoric times. Perhaps Wong offered this scene as a hopeful vision for his community’s future.
Teaching and Learning Strategies
Start by helping your students explore what community means to them. Ask them to write their own definitions of “community.”
- What makes a group of people a community? Do members of a community have to know each other? Do they have to share the same physical space?
- Ask students which communities they consider themselves part of (have them chose at least two).
- Encourage students to make a visual diagram or graphic organizer like a mind- map to explore their own identity in relation to the communities they’ve named. A Venn diagram would work too.
- Have students share their definitions and mind maps with the class.
Label a city or regional map with the names of different communities. Do the many communities to which your students belong interact or relate to each other? How?
Documenting communities: Have students visit with and then document their own community or a local community of choice/interest using one of the visual arts. (Examples include: graphic novel, photography, drawing, painting, or sculpture.) When observing and documenting communities, remember that you are a guest—ask for permission first when making any kinds of recordings.
Opportunity for discussion: How do communities change over time (or how are they forced to change)? What roles can housing, infrastructure, or zoning play in these changes? Have students research local and/or global communities to answer these questions.