Pao Houa Her Shares HMong Stories Through Photography From San José To Sheboygan

Forbes

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"Pao Houa Her: The Imaginative Landscape" installation view at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, 2025. Pao Houa Her, Attention series, 2012–14. Courtesy of the artist and Bockley Gallery. John Michael Kohler Arts Center
The United States' 'Secret War' in Laos roughly paralleled its war in Vietnam. Both in time frame and purpose. From the early 1960s until 1975, while waging open war against communist backed forces in north Vietnam, a covert war directed by the Central Intelligence Agency was carried out in Laos. Laos shares Vietnam's western border and runs lengthwise about two-thirds down the country.
Similar to Vietnam, Laos was engulfed in a civil war during this period pitting U.S.-backed, right wing, regimes against Soviet-backed, left wing, communists. Unlike in Vietnam, the U.S. and Soviets had signed a treaty in 1962 declaring Laos would maintain its neutrality.
Officially.
Neither superpower was interested in that.
Unofficially.
The Ho Chi Minh Trail led through northern Laos. It funneled Soviet-backed troops, supplies, and support into north Vietnam for use against the South Vietnamese and Americans in Vietnam. The Soviets wanted it to remain open. The Americans wanted it closed.
Without being able to place U.S. troops in Laos, the CIA orchestrated the largest bombing campaign in world history to that point. More bombs dropped from American planes on Laos than were deployed by the Allies in World War II. Laos is not a large nation, relatively speaking. Smaller than Vietnam. About the size of mainland Japan.
The CIA also recruited Indigenous people opposed to the communist forces in Laos to fight on America's behalf. Remember, this period was also a civil war. Primary among these groups were the HMong. Over the course of the 'Secret War,' roughly 30,000 HMong fought on the U.S. 'side.'
Hundreds of thousands of people were killed in Laos on both sides. Hundreds of millions were spent in Laos by both do it.
When the war in Vietnam and the Laotian Civil War were over, and the Soviet supported communists had defeated their American supported adversaries, HMong people, and those who had fought alongside them, became targets of political persecution. Murder.
They fled to refugee camps in Thailand, the next country west.
Then to America, by the thousands.
As with Vietnamese people who supported America and suddenly found themselves political targets after the Fall of Saigon, the United States supported a mass immigration of HMong from Laos.
They came first to California, many settling in the Bay Area. HMong people also wound up in Minneapolis and Saint Paul, MN, and Wisconsin next door, in large numbers. They were initially hosted by church communities. Once the populations gained a foothold, word of mouth among HMong people encouraged more to make their way to these places.
Pao Houa Her is a HMong artist based in Minnesota with simultaneous exhibitions of her art on view at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, WI, and the San José Museum of Art in California. Pao Houa Her
Born in Laos in 1982, Her fled with her family in the aftermath of the Laotian Civil War, spending a year in a refugee camp in Thailand before settling in Saint Paul. Her's work explores identity, longing, and belonging in a community culturally defined by an elsewhere.
'Pao Houa Her: The Imaginative Landscape' transports viewers to the jungles of Laos, the agricultural fields of California, the memories of elders, and the dreams of HMong community members across America. The exhibition is the artist's first museum survey, presenting over 50 new and recent photographs and video works both inside the John Michael Kohler Art Center and beyond JMKAC's walls, with installations at public sites and community gathering places around Sheboygan—from roadside billboards to yard signs, restaurants, a brewery, the local HMong Mutual Assistance Association building, and an active courtroom.
The two overlapping presentations–on view in Wisconsin through August 31, 2025, on view in San Jose July 11, 2025, through February 22, 2026–each tailored to their host city, reflect the diverse U.S. contexts in which HMong communities have adapted and built new homelands. The survey marks a major career milestone for Her whose work was featured in the 2022 Whitney Biennial and is currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art.
Sheboygan has long been a vital center for HMong culture and community, home to one of the largest HMong populations per capita in the United States. Wisconsin itself has the third-largest HMong population in the country, with deep connections to the Twin Cities region and California, where the largest U.S. HMong populations reside. 'The Imaginative Landscape' in Sheboygan
"Pao Houa Her: The Imaginative Landscape" installation view at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, 2025. Pao Houa Her, (from left) 'untitled,' Pictures of Paradise series, 2023–24; lenticular print. 'Kwv Txhiaj in the Valley of Widows,' 2023; single channel video, 24 minutes, looped. Courtesy of the artist and Bockley Gallery. John Michael Kohler Arts Center.
The John Michael Kohler Arts Center presentation begins in the building's entryway with banners bearing images from Her's portrait series Attention (2012-14). The series honors HMong 'Secret War' veterans who fought for the Americans by photographing them in military portrait style. The uniforms they wear have been sourced ad hoc, often purchased online. Remember, the Laotian Civil War and the HMong involvement on behalf of America wasn't a formal, official engagement. There were no proper uniforms in the manner typically understood.
Participating–fighting and dying–on behalf of America in a publicly unsanctioned war has left HMong soldiers doubly disgraced: forced to flee their home country and unrecognized for their service in their new country. Remember. Secret war. The United States government in no way has been interested in acknowledging this happened, let alone honoring the veterans who it enrolled on the ground.
Recognition by the new country, America, for their military service in the old country, Laos, after having fled the old country for the new country, has been a decades long process for HMong soldiers.
In Sheboygan's Deland Park right on Lake Michigan, a national Lao, HMong, and American veterans of the 'Secret War' memorial provides extensive background on the conflict while honoring individuals who fought on behalf of the U.S. Be sure to see it.
JMKAC also displays a series of Her's lenticular photographs–prints in which the image changes as viewers change their viewpoint around it. The photographs are massive, six feet across.
'A few years ago, (Her's) father brought the family to Laos, loaded them up in a passenger van and took them around to sites in the jungle where they hid, when the family, including Pao as a toddler, escaped Laos, places where he remembered: this is an enclave where we hid, or this is where someone died, or even this is where someone was born,' Jodi Throckmorton, John Michael Kohler Arts Center Chief Curator and exhibition curator, told a group of media touring the exhibition in May. 'These landscapes that seem completely overgrown, what does this jungle remember of that time? (Pao was) thinking about how she can really bring people into these images and into the jungle with her.'
The jungle remembers it all. The agony. The fear. So do the people, like Pao's father, who lived it. Even if, like most survivors of war and trauma, they don't wish to constantly relive it.
'(Pao says) it's not something her family talked a lot about,' Throckmorton said. 'There's generations of people here that their families don't talk about this experience of being forced to flee, and what it's like to move to the United States. This work conjures a lot of memories for people.'
Not good ones.
Another of Pao's not good memories is shared through an enormous, wall-sized video paired with a haunting HMong kwv txhiaj , song poetry.
'She's never shown this one before because unbeknownst to her, the videographer had shared with the singers that Pao's husband had very recently, tragically, passed away at a young age,' Throckmorton explained. 'So the singers, what you hear in HMong is them singing from the perspective of Pao and her husband, across life and death. It's an incredibly moving song.' Artwork In A Courtroom
Pao Houa Her, 'untitled,' My Mother's Flowers series, 2016; lightbox. Courtesy of the artist and Bockley Gallery. John Michael Kohler Arts Center
'The Imaginative Landscape' in Sheboygan moves visitors around town, most remarkably to an active courtroom at the Sheboygan County Courthouse where Her shows images from the series After the Fall of HMong Tebchaw (2017). The series of black-and-white photographs reflect on the historic loss of 'tebchaw' (homeland) and a more recent scandal in which a Minnesota HMong man swindled nearly $4 million from elders by claiming he was negotiating government-backed land purchases in Laos to create a HMong country.
Judge Natasha Torry, a JMKAC board member, presides over the courtroom. She welcomed in the artworks.
'I have always been interested in the idea of the court being a community center,' Torry told Forbes.com. 'Originally, I was a municipal court judge, and that's referred to as a community based alternative to the criminal justice system. I've tried to do things like have restorative justice. There was a discussion of (having) this exhibition and they were looking for places that are not typically where you would have art being displayed.'
Torry's candidly dumpy, dingy, dated, wood panel lined courtroom allowed for the placement of contemporary art and the banging of nails into walls which would have been forbidden in one of the ornate ground floor courtrooms.
'I've had HMong people make comments and appreciate it,' Torry said. 'Almost right when it was up, I had a HMong defendant sentenced for something, and they even said, 'Judge, thank you for the art.'' 'The Imaginative Landscape' in San José
Pao Houa Her, 'My grandmother's favorite grandchild – Pao Houa' from 'My grandfather turned into a tiger' series, 2017. Courtesy of the artist and Bockley Gallery.
Her's San José Museum of Art presentation is a more typical museum exhibition weaving together California's agricultural landscapes with the jungles of Laos and Minnesota poppy fields, offering a compelling exploration of migration, labor, and identity. These issues are deeply intertwined with California's history and evolving cultural landscape.
The exhibition includes a series of large-scale light boxes showcasing images of Mount Shasta's landscape in Northern California. This is an area where HMong farmers, drawing upon ancestral knowledge of highland opium cultivation, have adapted their skills to cannabis farming amid the so-called 'Green Rush.' More From Forbes Forbes Ogden Museum Of Southern Art In New Orleans Commemorates 50th Anniversary Of Fall Of Saigon By Chadd Scott Forbes Midwestern Grotto Tradition Celebrated In Sheboygan, Wisconsin By Chadd Scott Forbes San José Museum Of Art Introduces Dedicated Permanent Collection Galleries By Chadd Scott