During my annual textile bazaar I have the opportunity to meet many people who love textiles. Sometimes they bring me a piece to see. This year a young design student from the Academy of Art in San Francisco brought an amazing H’mong story cloth, made by his aunt who lives in a refugee camp in Thailand. I had seen examples of this type of textile before in the morning market in Vientiane, but never before have I seen one as large and as beautifully crafted as this one. The student’s name is Billy Vang, born in North Carolina where there is a large community of H’mong people who emigrated to the US after the Vietnam war. The H’mong are an ethnic group in SE Asia who live in the mountainous regions of Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand. He maintains close contact with his family there and wants to preserve and promote his heritage by telling the story of the H’mong by way of their textiles. He would also like to help improve their standard of living by introducing and promoting their cultural heritage, especially through their textiles. As a student of fashion design, he hopes to incorporate some of their design motif into his work.
The H’mong call their textile art “paj ntaub” (pronounced pa-dao) meaning “flower cloth”, a reference to the many bright colors used like flowers in a field. The story cloth is an adaptation of traditional embroidery techniques used on clothing. They are a product of the refugee experience where often the H’mong were not permitted to wear their traditional clothing. It provided a way for them to reflect on their experience, tell the story of their persecution and suffering, and also assert their identity and express their traditional values of family and village life.
Joua Xiaong who created this piece is in her early thirties and has lived most of her life in the Ban Nam Yao Refugee Camp in Nan Province, Thailand. She created two identical story cloths; the sister to this piece is in the Childrens’ Museum of Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
Post a Comment