Pao Houa Her, untitled, 2022. Courtesy the artist and Bockley Gallery, Minneapolis.
Pao Houa Her (US, b. Laos, 1982) is known for her powerful photographs focusing on the Hmong diaspora in the United States and Laos, exploring themes of migration, displacement, and social and ecological resilience. Using a formally rigorous approach and working with both color and black-and-white photography, the Twin Cities–based artist draws from traditions of portraiture, landscape, and still life, critically and playfully engaging the boundaries between fiction and reality.
For her solo exhibition at the Walker, Her debuts a new body of work that centers the experiences of Hmong Americans in the Mount Shasta region of Northern California, a much-contested landscape that has in recent years become the site of considerable subsistence agriculture and cannabis cultivation. Hmong farmers have used their ancestral knowledge of highland agriculture to cultivate the mountain’s volcanic terrain. The exhibition title Paj qaum ntuj translates to “Flowers of the Sky,” a Hmong phrase alluding to growing marijuana. The poetic and vivid quality of this saying demonstrates the artist’s interest in how Hmong language and land often intertwine.
Despite their successes in growing crops and forming vibrant communities in this harsh landscape, the artist points out that Hmong Americans in the Mount Shasta region have also experienced anti-Asian retaliation, criminal profiling, violent policing, and limited governmental protection during natural disasters. Counter to the media’s images of strife, Her’s work lends a poetic dignity and bodily reality to the on-the-ground experience and offers an intimate portrait of the community.
Conceived as a multipart installation, the exhibition includes a series of new large-scale lightboxes featuring images of Mount Shasta’s stark landscape. The display of these works mimics strategies of advertising and communicates the luminous allure of a promised land. The Hmong word tebchaw—literally “land-place”—describes country, nation-state, or region. Figuratively, it relates to a desire for one’s homeland and the geographies that conjure hope in the memories of many Hmong people.
The exhibition also features a selection of satellite photographs showing views of the area’s farmland, prompting questions about ways that governments manage and control populations. A two-channel moving image and sound installation inspired by kwv-txhiaj, or Hmong song poetry, plays in the gallery. This complex musical and literary tradition in Hmong culture is often performed in pairs: parent to child, friend to friend, or lover to lover. The art form expresses a wide range of subjects, including nature, kinship, emotion, and courtship, and serves a vital role in passing knowledge through generations.
Pao Houa Her: Paj qaum ntuj / Flowers of the Sky
July 28, 2022–January 22, 2023
Victoria Sung, associate curator, Visual Arts; and Matthew Villar Miranda, curatorial fellow, Visual Arts
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Pao Houa Her is recognized for her provocative photographs of the Hmong, the indigenous people of Laos who immigrated to the United States following the Vietnam War. Highly personal, Her’s images are not only a narrative extension of her own experience of being born in Laos and fleeing the country with her family at age three, but they also sensitively document the larger ethnic Hmong culture that became increasingly established in various locations in the United States in the late 1970s and 1980s.
Her was born in 1982 in Laos, and was raised in St. Paul, MN. She currently lives in Blaine, MN. She received an MFA in photography from the Yale University School of Art, New Haven, CT, in 2012, and a BFA in photography from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 2009. Her received a McKnight Artists Fellowship in 2016, a Jerome Fellowship for Emerging Artists in 2013, and was awarded Initiative Grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board in 2009 and 2012. She also received an Alice Kimball Fellowship in 2012.
Since 2012, Her’s photographs have garnered solo exhibitions at the Minneapolis Institute of Art; Franklin Artworks in Minneapolis; the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum in East Lansing, MI; and the Center for Hmong Studies, the Gordon Parks Gallery, and the Bindery Projects, all in St. Paul. Her’s photographs have also been featured in group shows at the Telemark Art Center in Skein, Norway; the Minnesota Museum of Art in St. Paul; the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago; and the Camera Club of New York. Her participated in the 2022 edition of the Whitney Biennial.
RELATED EVENTS
Opening-Day Talk and Community Reception: Pao Houa Her
Thursday, July 28, 6 pm
Free
In celebration of the opening of Pao Houa Her: Paj qaum ntuj / Flowers of the Sky, join us for a conversation with the artist and exhibition curators Victoria Sung and Matthew Villar Miranda. The exhibition centers the experiences of Hmong Americans in the Mount Shasta region of Northern California, a much-contested landscape that has in recent years become the site of considerable subsistence agriculture and cannabis cultivation. Through her large-format photographs of the surrounding landscape, Her’s work lends a poetic dignity and bodily reality to the community’s on-the-ground experience.
A reception will immediately follow the artist talk. It will feature a bar and small bites by James Beard nominated chef Yia Vang and his team.
Free tickets to the talk will be available at the Main Lobby desk beginning at 5 pm. Please check back closer to the date for program details and current COVID-19 guidelines. The talk will have ASL interpretation.
Gallery admission is free on Thursday nights, 5–9 pm. Admission tickets must be reserved separately, quantities are limited.
Green Roof Poetry: FAWK Curated by May Lee-Yang
Thursday, August 25, 6:30–8 pm
Free
Join us for a night of stand-up and storytelling featuring the Funny Asian Women Kollective (FAWK). Curated by May Lee-Yang, the event features local Hmong women artists Houa Moua, Kazua Melissa Vang, and Tsuab Yang using comedy to converse with the exhibition Pao Houa Her: Paj qaum ntuj / Flowers of the Sky and the artist’s powerful photographs documenting the Hmong diaspora in the United States.