Basel Social Club 2025Rittergasse 21-25, CH-4051 Basel, Switzerland15 - 21 June 2025
ROH Basel Social Club 2025

 

 

 

ROH is pleased to share installation images of Tcheu Siong’s (b. 1947, Luang Prabang, Laos) presentation at Basel Social Club 2025. 

 

 

 

 

 

Tcheu Siong is a self-taught Hmong artist known for her hand-stitched embroideries and reverse appliqué textiles. While such techniques have been integral to Hmong culture for centuries, Siong’s compositions and iconography depart from Hmong traditions of geometric abstraction, favoring organic and bold figurative motifs inspired by creatures from the Hmong spiritual world that populate her dreams.

ROH Basel Social Club 2025

Basel Social Club
Rittergasse 21-25
CH-4051 Basel, Switzerland

15 - 21 June 2025 
2pm - midnight

 

 

 

 

 

Born 1968
Lives and works in Luang Prabang, Laos

Tcheu Siong is a self-taught artist with a prolific textile practice in hand stitched embroidery and reverse appliqué. While such techniques have been integral to Hmong culture for centuries, Tchue’s compositions and iconography depart from Hmong traditions of geometric abstraction, favoring organic and bold figurative motifs that foreground a field of white. While differentiated, her works retain Hmong designs’ symbolic function to express identity and culture through a visual language within an oral culture. Tcheu’s process involves both receiving images in her dreams as well as creating her own designs in order to design and plot the infinite characters populating the Hmong spirit world. While at times her complete compositions narrate specific oral histories, at other times Tcheu welcomes multiple readings of her work. In the artist giving presence to the unseen, she in turn gives agency to the active and complex role of spirits in everyday life, such as those for fertility or good health, to those who invoke punishment for harming the land, to elder spirits who train adolescent ones how to govern fairly. Yawm Saub Chao / Chao and the Three Spirits narrates the story of the immortal spirit who gave birth to the eighteen family names that comprise Hmong identity.