In 1954, with the ending of French colonial rule in Southeast Asia, the Geneva Accords established Laos as an independent state, led by the Royal Lao government. Five years later, however, the Pathet Lao, backed by the communist government of North Vietnam, initiated a civil war that escalated, along with the Vietnam War, until 1975. Although the United States, which supported the Royal Lao government, signed an agreement with the Soviet Union and North Vietnam in 1962 guaranteeing that Laos would be neutral territory during the Vietnam War, Soviet-backed troops began ferrying supplies to the Viet Cong through Laos in 1964.

In response, the United States dropped two million tons of bombs on the country to try to disrupt that supply line. Nearly a third of the 270 million small cluster bombs dropped on Laos never exploded, and by some estimates, at least 20,000 people have been killed by unexploded ordnance since the war ended. Roughly 400,000 Hmong people lived in Laos at the start of the war (out of a population of more than 2 million), primarily farmers who lived in the country’s highland and mountain regions, maintaining a distinct culture and language. The Hmong community largely supported the Royal Lao government, and the CIA covertly conscripted around 50,000 of its men to fight in a “secret war” against the communist forces. After the war, when the Pathet Lao came to power, those who had served in these special guerrilla units were targeted with execution, imprisonment, and reeducation camps.

Among the men conscripted to fight on the US side of this “secret war” were the father and grandfather of the photographer Pao Houa Her. Her’s grandfather died in the conflict; her father survived, and, along with many others who served in the special guerrilla units, resolved to flee. Her was still a baby when her family escaped through the jungles of Laos, feeding her opium to keep her from crying and giving away their location, until they reached a refugee camp in Thailand. They eventually made their way to the Twin Cities, home to one of the largest communities of Hmong refugees in the US, in 1986.

Her’s work is rooted in her immigrant community’s enduring sense of displacement and loss. One of her photographic series, After the Fall of Hmong Teb Chaw (2017), was inspired by a case in which a Hmong man conned some four hundred Hmong elders, many of whom lived in the same senior center in St. Paul, out of $1.7 million. Loosely translated, teb chaw means “Hmong country” or “homeland”; the swindler told his victims that he was involved in establishing a new Hmong state in Southeast Asia and that their “investment” would guarantee them land there. So deep was their longing that many people, including some of the victims, contributed to the man’s legal fees after he was arrested.

Half of the images in After the Fall of Hmong Teb Chaw are black-and-white photographs taken inside the Como Park Conservatory in St. Paul, popular with Hmong locals, who are drawn to the warmth and the familiar tropical plants—transplants like themselves. The other half are portraits of elders engulfed in artificial foliage, a nod to the prevalence of fake flowers in traditional Hmong portraits. The conservatory photographs include glimpses of skylights and window frames—intentional clues that the backdrop is not actually a tropical location—and a plastic sheen or a light scattering of dust reveals the greenery to be fake. What the photographs evoke is not the homeland itself but the yearning for it.

The Imaginative Landscape is the fitting title of a new book that accompanied a pair of recent overlapping exhibitions of Her’s work at the John Michael Kohler Art Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, and the San José Museum of Art in California. It includes images from Attention, a series depicting men who served in the CIA’s special guerrilla units. These formal portraits of veterans in uniform, posing in three-quarter profile in front of luxurious red drapery, appear straightforward. In fact the men weren’t given US military uniforms or medals when they served; they either made the ones they’re wearing by hand or found them on eBay or in surplus stores. Nor were they ever recognized for their service or offered veterans’ benefits.

At the Kohler, the images were printed on ten large banners hung high above viewers’ heads, elevating the men literally and figuratively. Yet Her doesn’t name her subjects. Instead, each portrait bears the simple title of Hmong Veteran, because the men preferred to remain unidentified out of fear that they would be accused of “stolen valor”: it is a federal crime under US law to falsely claim military honors. “These men risked their lives for the United States,” Her says in an interview with the Kohler’s chief curator, Jodi Throckmorton, included in the book. “They’re trying to reinsert themselves into a history that they were very much a part of but have been all but forgotten.”

Her hadn’t been aware of the details of Hmong military service in the secret war until she attended an uncle’s funeral, where men in uniform played an unpolished version of “Taps” as they escorted his coffin, which was draped in an American flag—rituals she later learned they had taught themselves by watching YouTube videos. Her studied the historical paintings and photographs of famous generals and Civil War soldiers at the National Portrait Galleries in London and Washington, D.C., in order to incorporate their conventions, including the three-quarter profile, into her portraits.

Her is attuned to the cultural significance of portraiture—as a marker of status, or of affection. In another series she draws on elements of traditional Hmong portraiture to explore the fragmentation and displacement of families by the secret war. My grandmother’s favorite grandchild (2016–2018) consists of variations on a photograph Her inherited when her grandmother died, a studio portrait of a young child dressed in traditional, ornate Hmong attire and standing in front of a colorful scenic backdrop. Commissioned by Her’s grandmother in a refugee camp in Thailand before the family left for the US, it shows one of Her’s cousins—a cousin who wasn’t coming with them.

This photograph was the only image that her grandmother ever displayed of any of her grandchildren, and Her grew up seeing it whenever she visited. “There was always something really magical about it,” she told Audrey Sands in an interview that appears in her first book, the poignant My Grandfather Turned into a Tiger…and Other Illusions (2024). “She was always like this princess to me. It stood out as a thing that I would never be, but the thing that I could always aspire to be. I wanted to be my grandmother’s favorite grandchild.” After the portrait came into Her’s possession, she made copies of it and, in a sweetly furtive intervention,
Photoshopped versions with each of her cousins’ faces, as well as her own, transforming them all into their grandmother’s favorite grandchild.

During the recent exhibitions, Her’s work spilled out of the museums and into the surrounding neighborhoods as a kind of guerrilla art. In San Jose images were wheatpasted onto buildings and construction barriers, hung in a local restaurant, and slipped into a rotating electronic display announcing events at the convention center. In Sheboygan they could be found on an illuminated sign on the grounds of 3 Sheeps Brewing, on a billboard at the Kohler Art Preserve (a ten-minute drive down the highway from the museum), on the walls of the Hmong Mutual Assistance Association, and at the Sheboygan County Circuit Court, where pictures of Hmong elders from her Imaginative Landscape series kept company with the portraits of robed judges, all white men.

Her wants her work to be visible to people going about their daily lives who may or may not find their way into a museum, just as she wants to challenge museumgoers. Her engrossing wall-sized videos of kwv txhiaj, or traditional song poetry, for instance, are entirely in Hmong (though visitors to both museums could scan a QR code for the English translations). “I love that there is a language, whether the language of photography or just the language of looking, that not everybody understands, or not everybody is privy to the notion of image-making,” Her told Paul Schmelzer in a 2022 interview. “I like that it reads so differently in different communities.”

Her’s use of vernacular materials, from wheatpasted posters or lawn signs to lenticular photography—made with special lenses to produce an illusion of depth—is both an invitation to viewers outside of the art world and a broadening of the conventions of museum display. The photographs that make up her series Pictures of paradise (2022–2024), for example, change when viewed from different angles. The form is more typically used for advertisements or novelty items like magnets or postcards, but Her used it to make large-scale images of the Laotian jungle after a 2022 trip with her family during which her father showed them the places where they had lived while fleeing.

As Lauren Schell Dickens, a senior curator at the San José Museum, points out in an essay in The Imaginative Landscape, Her’s Pictures of paradise is, in part, a response to Thomas Struth’s 1998 Paradise series. His photographs are of jungles or forests from around the world that he imagined were unaltered by human intervention. But Her’s present the jungle as a place where children were born, couples married, and people became ill and died. Viewed in person, the photographs are disorienting and hypnotic. Aspects of the landscape come in and out of focus, as though sunlight were filtering through branches or breezes were ruffling the leaves. The lenticular format seems to fold the reality of Laos into Her’s “memories” of Laos—memories handed down from her grandmother, who came over every weekend and told her stories about jungle spirits, and from her father, who worked at night and recorded folktales for Her and her sister to listen to on cassettes as they went to sleep.

At times Her’s work brings to mind that of An-My Lê, who was evacuated with her family from Saigon by the US military in 1975, when she was about fifteen. Lê’s large-scale photographs of tangled branches and dense sections of jungle in her series Viêt Nam (1994–1998), made on her first return trip, are given a formal elegance by their flawless black-and-white printing. But both Lê and Her combine fact and fiction. In her series Small Wars (1999–2002), Lê photographed—and sometimes participated in—the restaging of battles from the Vietnam War by reenactors in rural Virginia and North Carolina, who planted bamboo to replicate the vegetation of Vietnam in woods otherwise populated by the pine, spruce, and kudzu of the American South. Commenting on the paradoxical nature of landscape photography in an essay last year, Lê pointed to “its capacity to render the present in searing detail, while also evoking both the past and future through subjective suggestion.”

The past and the present for the Hmong American community intermingle in Her’s latest series, Seeds of History, recently on view at the Kohler. She made black-and-white photographs of Hmong residents of Sheboygan, out of doors, with the large leafy trees of Wisconsin behind them and a dense field of opium poppies in the foreground. For Hmong people poppies are symbols of prosperity, recalling a time when they cultivated the plant in Laos. “Elders often reflect on those days of prosperity,” Her writes in The Imaginative Landscape, “as a time when the land held more than just crops, but a sense of hope.”

That hope, and that history, is what has drawn many Hmong people to the Mount Shasta region of Northern California during the past two decades to become marijuana farmers. Her traveled to the region a few years ago to make a series of black-and-white landscape photographs. The mountainous, rocky terrain recalls northern Laos, where Hmong farmers grew poppies for generations; here, as there, they must carry in the water needed to coax a crop out of unfavorable soil.

Unlike many of Her’s other photographs, her Mt. Shasta series (2021–2022) contains no people. Instead it shows dry, twisted tree branches and yellowed grasses, sometimes with the white mountain peaks in the distance. But the images include evidence of humans, and of the labor that goes into growing a crop in such an inhospitable landscape: a serpentine hose, a plastic bag caught on a branch, a piece of discarded netting. Her mounts the photographs on lightboxes, borrowing a format most often used for advertising to suggest the glow of the American Dream—even as the idea is instantly undercut by the hardscrabble emptiness of the landscapes.

In Her’s work, imagined landscapes often resonate more than real ones. The flowers in her portraits are no less treasured for being made of plastic; the military uniforms worn by the Hmong veterans command respect despite being cobbled together by the veterans themselves. She and her cousins are her grandmother’s favorites because Her created and “documented” that imagined reality, photographing it into being.