About the Video
14 to 41 shows a family moment of the artist's father cleaning his truck during a 1994 Columbus, OH snowstorm while the mother films it.
The title "14 to 41" comes from the age 14 when the father fled Laos, and age 41 when the house in this video was foreclosed - one domino of many that pushed the father to return to Laos permanently. 14 is also the latitude that bounds Southern Laos to the South, and latitude 41 bounds Central Ohio to the North. The background collage contains images from major points of the father's migration story as a Refugee of the Laotian Civil War (better known as the Secret War, or the "Vietnam War"). The falling snow recalls the vivid first memories of snow that have stayed with many adult refugees from Southeast Asia even decades after first arriving in the US.
The images of Southern Laos and the US Rust Belt may look like a mashup of juxtapositions that have nothing to do with a family having a snow day, but all of the background imagery is deeply embedded into the destiny of this family.
(Digitally) Scribbled onto the walls of Wat Phu is the following graffiti:
"You don't see five hundred thousand refugees crammed into camps in Isan*, but they're in every pixel of this artwork."
"You don't see the scars of Refugee life haunt a family across generations, but..."
*Isan is the Northeast Region of Thailand that has been inhabited by Lao people for 700+ years, and before that by Indigenous Mon-Khmer peoples. All photos are the artist's own or were gathered from the artist's family members.
Social Media
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/singhasonh/
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Singhasonh
ARTIST: TIMOTHY SINGRATSOMBOUNE
about the artist
Timothy Singratsomboune is a Lao American writer, actor, and multimedia artist from Central Ohio. His editorials about arts, culture, and activism can be found in the Minneapolis-based blog Little Laos on the Prairie, which highlights the underrepresented diasporas of various ethnic groups from Laos.
His visual artworks have been displayed at Brand New: Ohio, an artist showcase that highlights Southeast Asian and Pacific Islander artists in the Buckeye State – which he co-founded.
As the son of a refugee community and a repeat-offender of community organizing, Singratsomboune draws on themes of displacement, borders, rebirth, and allure to tie a faai phouk khaaen to other restless spirits.
You may have also seen his handiwork on protest signs at racial and labor justice actions in Ohio, Texas, Illinois, or Washington, DC.
about the art
2020 taught me to dig deeper in new and scary ways. At the beginning of that challenging year, I crossed many borders to enter my ancestral homeland of Laos for the first time. Visiting Laos reignited my passion to express my Lao American heritage, and it fueled a fire in me to reconnect with Lao American communities in more creative ways.
But when the pandemic hit, most of my travel and community-building plans fell through.
Not to be deterred, I used the stay-at-home orders to dive deep into the Lao art, literature, and language that I had only enjoyed at a surface level. Through this journey of discovery, I have walked into a new beginning of not just representing and enjoying Lao culture, but of fully reckoning with it. And sometimes this means striking out in a direction that strays from the community that I love.
Empowered by my discoveries, I have leaned into the fact that neither my culture nor heritage is infallible – and they don’t need to be. They are messy, and living, and breathing, and evolving – just like me. I have grown to use my artistic lens to see beyond any royal elitism, spiritual exclusionism, and anti-indigeneity that seep into the ways that so many Asian nations and their Diasporas display their “traditional” cultures.
In my new beginnings, I have decided to claim my power and define my relationship with my heritage for myself. This evolving relationship is one of imaginative, strange, colorful, brave, brash, but caring dialogue that I represent visually in my artwork in 2021 and beyond.
