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.
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.”
The Hmong people migrated to Southeast Asia from ancient China in the 18th century. After the 1975 Communist takeover in Laos, the Hmong in that country faced tremendous persecution for collaborating with the US and fled en masse across the Mekong River into Thailand. Tens of thousands were then resettled in America, and 50 years later, they number 330,000, or 1% of the Asian American community.
Born in Laos in 1982, Her left with her family at a young age, spending a year in a refugee camp in Thailand before settling in St. Paul. Through her images, Her considers a homeland that she knows primarily through family lore and examines what happens when nostalgia and fantasy collide with the reality of displacement.
“Pao’s simultaneous embrace of vernacular with high-art-historical references and technological-innovation photography is unique,” observes SJMA co-director and chief curator Lauren Schell Dickens. “She brings them all together toward this conceptual aim, which is around asking questions and learning about her own community.”
The first Hmong woman to graduate from Yale’s MFA program and today an assistant professor of photography and moving images at the University of Minnesota, Her tells Vogue that art remains an uncertain concept for many Hmong. “We still don’t have a Hmong term for fine arts, but art is actually something that we practice every day,” she says from her Twin Cities studio. “We just don’t think of it as art.”
From her deep concern about art access emerged the idea of installing works well beyond both museums. “I never went to museums growing up, my parents have never been to a museum,” she explains. “It wasn’t until art school that I started going, and even then I felt out of place because the art and artists there did not reflect who I am. That has always been at the forefront of my thinking: How can I say my work is for the Hmong community if I’m not showing in Hmong spaces?”
In Sheboygan—a city of 50,000 an hour north of Milwaukee on Lake Michigan’s western shore—some of Her’s images blend almost seamlessly into their environment. The eagle-eyed may spot them on an illuminated commercial sign along a roadside hill, on the side of a popular brewery, and inside a busy Thai restaurant, among other locations. “I sort of took over the town,” Her says, grinning. “There’s a confrontation that happens, whether you want it or not. I really like these moments of thoughtful intervention and chance encounters that feel accessible to everybody.”
At some sites, however, Her’s works boldly stand out. An active courtroom, for example, is bedecked with black-and-white portraits of Hmong American elders against artificial-foliage backdrops evoking the lush landscapes of Laos. “What is the relationship between these large portraits of Hmong folks and this courtroom?” she imagines visitors wondering. “I love the confusion that happens when people enter that space.” She notes that one Hmong man sentenced in that courtroom afterward thanked the judge for the Hmong portraits on the walls.
From a low-slung building on a quiet block, the Hmong Mutual Assistance Association has provided vital advocacy and a gathering place for the 5,000-strong Sheboygan Hmong community for 45 years. On a spring Saturday, its community room is set up for what appears to be a baby shower, with a photo-ready arch of balloons and artificial flowers in a corner. Her’s black-and-white print of an arrangement of artificial flowers that hangs nearby only enhances the luncheon ambience.
Other images from the 2016 series My Mother’s Flowers likewise create a rich resonance—and some tension. That series combines portraits of women lifted from Hmong dating websites with Her’s own portraits of Hmong women and still lifes of flowers, exploring floral motifs as a symbol of Hmong womanhood and interrogating ideas of gender and desire in a community grappling with entrenched patriarchy. Staffer M Chang gestures to a wall of portraits of past association presidents, where two of Her’s portraits of women sit: “We wanted to disrupt this lineage of mainly male presidents,” she says pointedly.
It provoked some controversy, and a displeased community elder removed them at one point. “In the Hmong language, when someone says, ‘It doesn’t look good’ or ‘It’s not pretty,’ it’s typically not about aesthetics,” Chang explains. “It’s more that it’s offensive or not proper.”
But overall the reception in the Sheboygan community has been positive, Throckmorton notes. She’s been heartened by the many yard signs produced for the show that have popped up on local front lawns—which she views as a subtle protest in this longtime swing state where “Don’t Stop Praying” and “Make America Great Again” signs also adorn homes. (Trump won Wisconsin in 2024 with the highest percentage a Republican candidate has received there in 40 years.) “You’re showing support for an immigrant community and the idea of refugees,” she says of the signs bearing vivid color photos of flowers and foliage. “I mean, they’re also beautiful images, so people could just enjoy the way they look. But I don’t think anyone would put something in their yard that they didn’t care about.”
Her’s virtuosity comes into fuller view in San José, where the works seen around Sheboygan are presented in a more traditional museum setting. While the Wisconsin presentation focused on her engagement with the Hmong community, the SJMA’s emphasis is on the constructed nature of the images. Telltale details of artifice surface in these larger gallery images: Backdrops emerge more prominently, noticeable seams and threads materialize in artificial arrangements, a layer of dust coats a fake bamboo plant, a rubber hose snakes into a seemingly untrammeled landscape.
“Pao’s work has all these complexities within itself, but it is so impacted by the context in which it appears,” emphasizes Dickens. “She’s always representing the Hmong experience, but she is much more interested in the psychological weight of diaspora and the constructedness of place rather than just representing a place or a person.” A block away, on the convention center’s digital billboards, Her’s images rotate unobtrusively through announcements of upcoming events—another chance encounter.
Both curators acknowledge that few will see the exhibition in its entirety across the two cities. But, if you only saw one presentation, Dickens insists, you’d only see one side of Pao’s multilayered practice. In Throckmorton’s words, “The two projects get at her as a whole, reflecting the responsibilities she feels as she straddles that tension between her community and the art world. Pao’s an artist whose work you can’t celebrate in just one way.”
“Pao Houa Her: The Imaginative Landscape” is on view at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center through August 31 and at the San José Museum of Art through February 22, 2026.
