Pao Houa Her: The Imaginative Landscape

Combining photomontage with portraiture and scenes of Hmong American communities, Her mixes the real with the artificial in search of a diasporic identityPublished with San José Museum of Art and John Michael Kohler Arts Center. Rooted in the experience of her Hmong community and shaped by family lore passed down by her elders, Pao Houa Her (born 1982) investigates the potential of photography to create nonlinear narratives exploring construction. She brings together formal and vernacular photographic languages manipulated into light boxes, wheat-pasted images and videos. Her's adoptive homes of Minnesota and California become stand-ins for Laos; plastic florals replace living tropics; ersatz and real meld together. The Imaginative Landscape traces Her's ever-deepening exploration into concepts of home and belonging. With essays and an artist interview, this catalog explores Her's work in genres of portraiture, landscape, still life and the vernacular, as she photographs herself and the people and places around her through the tinted lens of diasporic longing.