Episode 27 Resources:

Not Your Average Hmong Clothes

We learned so much about Hmong history from speaking with Sheng that we were also inspired to dig further into the stories of Hmong women makers and small business owners. Please read below for more information about Sheng. If you are inspired by the episode, or our Instagram Live series please check out resources at the bottom of the page to start your own enterprise.

about sheng lor

Sheng Lor is a textile artist whose practice combines thread, natural dyes, and real and imagined text to examine Asian diasporic memory and explore a re-description of the Hmong experience through the perspective of cloth.

She was born in a Thai refugee camp in 1987 and resettled to Stockton, CA, in 1989 with her parents and siblings. One of her most important memories growing up is of Hmong women bonding together to make embroidered textiles to clothe themselves and their families and to generate income. This understanding of textiles as both a significant source of work for immigrant women and a material expression of cultural and social values prompted Sheng to choose textiles as the medium for her artistic practice.

Her current work focuses on the intersections and relationships between writing systems, cloth, and narrative. For women like her mother and grandmother who made so much cloth-- women who drew the wax across the hemp, dyed the indigo, and stitched the symbols into patterns-- who carried and kept alive the people’s original writing, what did they say? In other words, Sheng’s work is an inquiry on the Hmong diasporic story that begins by asking first: “what does the cloth know?”

She has a bachelor’s degree in art from the University of California at Davis and currently works out of San Francisco.