Pao Houa Her’s practice engages with the legacies, potentials, and aesthetics of landscape and portrait photography traditions, examining the complex intertwining of desire, homeland, and artifice. Rooted in the experience of her Hmong community and shaped by family experiences and lore passed down by her elders, Her’s work centers women as the knowledge bearers of both past and future. Using a formally rigorous photographic approach, Her explores constructions of homeland that resonate across diasporas.

Pao Houa Her: The Imaginative Landscape is an unconventional survey of over 20 years. Seen through the expansive titular series, it traces conceptual ties between past series, new work, and work still under development, connecting California agricultural landscapes to the jungles of Laos, poppy fields in Minnesota, and beyond. Her’s images are also dispersed across downtown San José in unexpected place—outside and indoors, on walls and on screens—a reminder of the tenacity of diasporic communities flourishing throughout our city.

The exhibition is co-organized by Lauren Schell Dickens, chief curator at SJMA, and Jodi Throckmorton, chief curator at John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, and will be presented at both organizations simultaneously.