Artist Pao Houa’s Fantasy and Fabrication Through a Hmong American Lens

In 2012, artist Pao Houa Her observed a group of Hmong men perform a military honors ceremony at her uncle’s funeral. She learned that they had taught themselves taps and the ritual folding of the American flag through YouTube videos; they purchased their uniforms and regalia online and in military-surplus shops. These men, like Her’s uncle and father, had fought in the Secret War of the 1960s and early 1970s, in which the CIA covertly recruited and trained the Hmong ethnic minority living in Laos to fight Communist forces. But they and their families were later denied benefits and formal recognition by the United States government.

As a gesture of remembrance and respect, Her photographed these veterans in the style of formal military portraits for her earliest series, Attention (2012–14). Today those venerating portraits hang as striking larger-than-life banners in the lofty atrium at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center (JMKAC) in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, as part of “Pao Houa Her: The Imaginative Landscape,” the first-ever survey of her work.

Pao Houa Her’s Attention series (2012–14) hangs in the entrance atrium of the John Michael Kohler Arts Center.Courtesy of the artist and Bockley Gallery. Photo: Courtesy of John Michael Kohler Arts Center.

For two decades, Her has reflected on longing, homeland, and artifice through a personal lens, grounded in her own Hmong American experience while engaging with American landscape photography, colonial studio portraiture, and Hmong vernacular photography. Through photographs, video works, and large-scale installations, she ties together California’s agricultural landscapes, Minnesota’s poppy fields, and the jungles of Laos in images imbued with profound sorrow, humor, resilience, and pride.

Co-organized by and on view at both JMKAC and the San José Museum of Art (SJMA) in the San Francisco Bay Area—Wisconsin and California having the largest Hmong American communities in the US—the show expands far beyond the gallery walls: Installations grace public sites and community gathering spaces throughout Sheboygan, and in San José, wheat-pasted posters have cropped up unannounced on boarded-up corners and vacant lots.

“We couldn’t do a survey of Pao’s work without highlighting one of the things that’s really special about her practice,” says JMKAC chief curator Jodi Throckmorton, “which is that it is out in the world, not just in museums. She’s introducing people to the Hmong community while showing the Hmong community that they’re represented.”