Pao Houa Her’s Images Capture the Impossibly Complex Idea of Home

You might encounter the art before you even reach the museum. Wheatpasted images from Pao Houa Her: The Imaginative Landscape, Her’s first major survey — and first California show ever — can be found throughout downtown San José. They appear on the plywood covering a parking garage’s wall, on a temporary barrier at a construction site, and on abandoned storefronts.

If images dispersed across disused spaces resemble a diaspora, that’s intentional. Diaspora and how we construct homeland from a distance is the heart of The Imaginative Landscape, co-organized and simultaneously co-presented by the San José Museum of Art and the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin.

Shortly after Pao Houa Her was born in 1982 in northern Laos, her parents fled the ongoing violence from “the American War” (aka the Vietnam War) by heading into the jungle with their firstborn silenced with opium for safety and their second child on the way. Prior to immigrating to Minnesota in 1986, Her’s family spent a year in three refugee camps in Thailand, where they decorated the makeshift walls with wheatpasted images.

The Imaginative Landscape is a beautiful show, but it’s not a simple one. Her’s photographs of Mount Shasta, Laotian jungles, Hmong elders and her own family play with reality and artifice. The artist tips her hand constantly. Visible grommets on a backdrop confess photos were made in a studio, not on location. Living plants commingle with plastic flowers bearing a telltale reflective sheen. Longing suffuses the exhibition, but it’s a longing that recognizes “the homeland is not a reality,” as Her told KQED.

“[Her] draws attention to the constructedness of the image,” explains chief curator and interim co-director Lauren Schell Dickens. They are “an analysis of how the Hmong diaspora is constructing homeland,” she says. It’s a sophisticated distinction.

Obtaining an actual homeland tempted Hmong elders so strongly, 400 of them invested in a swindler’s promise to establish a physical “Hmong Country” in Southeast Asia from 2014 to 2016. FBI charges didn’t diminish the longing; the elders kept giving the con man money. In a series titled After the Fall of Hmong Teb Chaw, Her alternates portraits of donors at the Hmong Elders Center in Saint Paul, Minnesota with photos of lush tropical plants taken in the Como Park Conservatory, where Her’s family visited on wintery days for a touch of equatorial warmth.

If Her had been with Dorothy as she heel-clicked “there’s no place like home,” she might have told the Kansas farmgirl it’s more complicated than that.

Pushed out of China by Qing dynasty reforms in the 18th century, the Hmong dispersed to Southeast Asia. Unwelcome in the cities, the Hmong were given inhospitable land in northern Laos where they flourished by growing opium poppies. Her sees the contemporary Hmong community of marijuana cultivators around Mount Shasta as a “repeated history.”

At the museum, three images of Mount Shasta shine on wall-mounted lightboxes. The bright medium of bus stop and mall advertisements modernizes Manifest Destiny imagery that encouraged would-be settlers to move West. Her’s black-and-white photos invoke a past era, though their crispness discloses their modern origins. In their desolation, the arid landscapes promise a future to diasporic communities: these are spaces unwanted by dominant groups.

Three verdant unmarked landscapes from Her’s Pictures of Paradise series, displayed for the first time, commemorate sections of the Laotian jungle where specific life moments occurred while Her’s family hid from violence. The title riffs on Thomas Struth’s New Pictures from Paradise, a series the German photographer described as “ahistorical.” Her’s photographs of where her grandmother got sick and where her cousin was born counter colonial myths of “untouched” lands. The lenticular photography shifts the image as the viewer moves; stable knowledge eludes us.

Photography has always given the impression of truth. “Pics or it didn’t happen” is a common refrain, but photography and duplicity have existed in tandem since the beginning of the medium. The exhibition title Imaginative Landscape is borrowed from Valerie Flint’s research on Christopher Columbus’ imagined — and highly erroneous — ideas of the West Indies. Her asks us to be aware of contrivance by divulging the artifice of the images she displays.

There’s a reason Her begins and ends the exhibit with the apparatus of photographic image-making. Entering the show, you immediately face a vinyl studio backdrop that itself pictures two photographed backdrops, one overlapping the other on its flat printed surface. A metal stand, the sort used for “Please wait here” restaurant signs, is positioned in front, bearing the portrait of a Hmong woman against a brick wall.

It gets more meta upon exiting. The reverse of the installation shows a field of orange California poppies growing in the Sierras under a brilliant blue sky. The pictured native California flowers are framed by fake, but three-dimensional, oriental poppies hanging on either side. A bench suggests you sit and pose for your own artificial image of homeland.

‘Pao Houa Her: The Imaginative Landscape’ is on view through Feb. 22, 2026 at the San José Museum of Art (110 South Market St., San José).