Pao Houa Her: The Imaginative Landscape
Pao Houa Her’s photographic practice traces the artist’s deepening exploration of diasporic constructions of homeland among her Hmong American community.
Pao Houa Her: The Imaginative Landscape (2025-07-11)San José Museum of Art
Photography is a truth, if you want it to be a truth —Pao Houa Her
Pao Houa Her: The Imaginative Landscape (2025-07-11) by Pao Houa HerSan José Museum of Art
Pao Houa Her’s artwork is rooted in Hmong stories of migration and belonging.
Pao Houa Her: The Imaginative Landscap (2025-07-11) by Pao Houa HerSan José Museum of Art
Over one hundred thousand Hmong were forced to flee Laos in the wake of the Vietnam War, including the artist and her family.
Their loss of homeland remains profoundly felt, impacting subsequent diasporic generations differently.
Pao Houa Her: The Imaginative Landscape (2025-07-11) by Pao Houa HerSan José Museum of Art
Attentive to such layers of memory and longing, Her intertwines truth and artifice, to explore how desire and belief implicate what we value and see.
The Imaginative Landscape—an unconventional survey of a decade of work—takes its title from an expansive 2018–20 series that is, in part, a reimagining of the artist’s grandmother’s ideal of Laos.
Pao Houa Her: The Imaginative Landscape (2025-07-11) by Pao Houa HerSan José Museum of Art
Her conceptually and materially embeds references to multiple photographic histories, forms, and aesthetics.
Pao Houa Her: The Imaginative Landscape (2025-07-11) by Pao Houa HerSan José Museum of Art
Her connects highland tropical forests in Laos...
Pao Houa Her: The Imaginative Landscape (2025-07-11) by Pao Houa HerSan José Museum of Art
...to California farmlands, botanical conservatories and poppy fields in Minnesota, and beyond.
Pao Houa Her: The Imaginative Landscape (2025-07-11) by Pao Houa HerSan José Museum of Art
Like the shifting nature of belonging and the technologies she employs, Her’s images conceive truth as an ongoing question, as the artist imagines what might constitute a homeland for diaspora today.
Lauren Schell Dickens, chief curator at SJMA.
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