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Koua Mai Yang

@kouayang

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For the @chromazonefest I designed a poster featuring Hmong American artist Kuab Maiv Yaj/Koua Mai Yang. Last year, Koua embarked on a journey to wear Hmong everyday.
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Along the way Koua has received a full spectrum of responses that include praise, criticism, policing, harassment, and suggestions to alter their clothing to be more appealing to others.
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Along the way Koua has experienced a full spectrum of healing, remembering, comfort, discomfort, vulnerability and feeling unsafe. Koua’s work is beautiful, crucial, investigative, and dangerous. We live in a world where too often it’s dangerous to be yourself. It’s important for these stories and experiences to be heard and seen. It’s important that folx can freely and safely be themselves.
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Our screen print poster glows in the dark with the message to be yourself. We stand in solidarity with YOU. An edition of 50 posters were printed, signed and available for purchase at @cocreatz on the corner of University and Raymond Avenue (2388 University Avenue West, Saint Paul, MN.) Accessibility is important to Teeko, Oskar and I—that’s why we priced it at $25. Thank you for your continued support of @helloartcrop. We are proud to be a collective of Hmong womxn, non-binary folx, and artists.
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Learn more about Koua’s work at kouamyang.com and follow her on-going creative process on Instagram @kouayang. #womenofillustration

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Today's #FireBelliedFeminist is the brilliant Kuab Maiv Yaj/ Koua Mai Yang, a Hmong American female artist based in Saint Paul, MN. She is an Art MFA candidate and DOVE Fellow at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities who explores Hmong identity in her studio art practice. In her current project, Hnav Hmoob presented as a photo series, Kuab engages in traditional Hmong clothes making, dressing and performance to raise questions about Hmong materiality, culture and female representation through the circulation of global cultural production. She wonders: “How much do we participate in capitalism, in the selling and consuming of Hmong bodies, of Hmong knowledge... certainly, it’s always a little bit different when it’s a Hmong person selling [Hmong things] than when it’s a non-Hmong person selling [Hmong things], right? These are [the] things that I'm noticing globally. I feel the connection in the materials and I don't necessarily think it's unique to just me. I think a lot of Hmong people feel that when they come to [a] place where they don't expect to see themselves reflected but they see it in the materials.” As a recipient of the Richard Fink Summer Research Fellowship, the Berlin Studio-Artist Residency Program and the College of Liberal Arts, Kuab traveled to Europe to continue her Hnav Hmoob photo series: “I needed to experience being by myself, away from my family and away from a context that I know to intentionally disorientate myself, to see if I can actually orientate myself to a place, or to make sense of where I'm at and what I'm doing. Because essentially, it is something that Hmong people have been doing for who-knows-how-long since being displaced, right? So it's about retracing a kind of movement.” She further shares: “I am thinking a lot about memory, the unseen labor, the unseen things that has happened, that I think are still haunting this [Hmong] diaspora.” Kuab seeks to understand the history of Hmong traditional dress from a female perspective, a place of labor, experientially and through an embodied methodology: “Since I started dressing in traditional dress everyday, resistance seems to be everywhere." #FBFF #transformationalartist

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8 limited edition Aftabeh Trophies for 8 freshly minted MFAers. My remarkable class of 2019 @umn_art were simply the best group of human beings that I could ever ask to spend 3 years of my life with. #timetosaygoodbye

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Reflecting on the 2018 women’s Transnational Healing Summit... we need to gather again. #community #manawahine #artsaveslives #creative #wellness

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...those moments when you learn one of the real reasons you were invited to a conference. 📸: @marianunesphotography #universeatwork #synchronicity #nosuchthingasluck #healing

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#joy manifests when in the presence of amazing humans. Mahalo to all the womxn at the 2018 Transnational Healing Summit. My life is enriched. My soul recharged. My perspectives expanded. 📸: @marianunesphotography

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Koua Yang says "come on people! We trying to get the summit started!!"

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Tonight is a night for conversation and growth. Unlocking what Hmong Art means to each of us through a blend of casual and critical thought. See you soon.

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Are you listening? How are you responding? Come sit with us. We are open for gathering, sharing, and comradery.

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It's like an #ARTery geode! #Paint colors of the past as we rotate the space for future use! #jmkac #artsed

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