Performance: Radical Verses of Hmong Revitalization

Radical Verses of Hmong Revitalization

Performance by Tou SaiK Lee, hip hop artist, storyteller and spoken word poet from St. Paul, Minnesota. 

Tou SaiK is currently a graduate student in the master’s program of Southeast Asian Studies at UW Madison with a focus on Hmong indigenous identity of Southeast Asia. He founded Street Stops and Mountain Tops which connects teaching artists and organizers from the U.S. to work with Hmong students in villages and orphanages of Southeast Asia. Lee received the Bush Foundation Leadership Fellowship in 2016 to focus on research of the Hmong diaspora including communities in Vietnam, Australia, China and Thailand of how Hmong use traditional and contemporary arts as effective ways to revitalize culture. He released his first Hmong language Hip Hop album titled Ntiaj Teb Koom Tes - Unified Worldwide Summer of 2021. Tou SaiK was selected as a featured speaker by TEDx Minneapolis in 2021 about his current initiatives. Lee's talk titled “Reclaiming cultural identity and language through hip hop” can be found on YouTube.

Free and open to the public.