There are five different video channels in artist Pao Houa Her’s installation at Bockley Gallery, called “Nim ye,” but you wouldn’t necessarily know it if you were just listening to the sound rather than seeing the videos play out on the different Cathode ray tube TVs. Each of the channels feature a singing form from Hmong culture called kwv txhiaj, played intermittently and sourced from different time periods (some of the videos are several decades old, and there’s one that was commissioned recently). When you hear them all together— despite the large expanses of time and space between when the videos were recorded— they sound in harmony.
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Hmong is a tonal language, so there are actually pitch patterns that correspond with the words being communicated. The kwv txhiaj form (song poetry), brings the musicality of the language out in a melancholy echo, often featuring two singers trading the storytelling back and forth with each other.
Minnesota-based Hmong writer Kao Kalia Yang artfully describes kwv txhiaj in the first chapter of her book “The Song Poet: A Memoir of My Father.” She writes:
“In perfect pentatonic pitch my father sings his songs, grows them into long, stretching stanzas of four or five, structures them in couplets, repeats patterns of words, and changes the last word of each verse so that it rhymes with the end of the next. He is a master at parallelism, the language is protracted, and the notes are drawn deep and long. The only way I know how to describe it as a form in English is to say: my father raps, jazzes, and sings the blues when he dwells in the landscape of traditional Hmong song poetry.
“Nim ye” is an invitation to slow down. If you don’t happen to speak Hmong, you won’t know exactly the poetry of the words, but you can feel the emotion of the kwv txhiaj. Love, longing, transcendence— that’s all there in the music. It’s also a celebration of Hmong cultural traditions, even as Her, as is typical with the artist, transforms the traditional art form through a play of technology, layering and the installation of the archaic CRT TVs themselves.”
“Pao Houa Her: Nim ye” is on view through June 22 at Bockley Gallery, which is open Tuesdays through Saturdays, noon to 5 p.m. (free). More information here.
Sheila Regan
Sheila Regan is a Twin Cities-based arts journalist. She writes MinnPost’s twice-weekly Artscape column. She can be reached at [email protected].