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Asia

Pao Houa Her
Untitled (Como Park Conservatory) (After the Fall of Hmong Teb Chaw series)

Two black and white prints, from Pao Houa Her’s series After the Fall of Hmong Teb Chaw (2017) contextualize the desire for ‘teb chaw’, or ‘home’ in Hmong. A Hmong elder, dressed in traditional Laotian silk, sits amongst a lush fernery, beneath a burst of hanging flora. She rests in quiet contemplation, her eyes gazing afar at something we cannot see. Peer close and it becomes apparent that this picture, which conjures fading sensations of humidity, heat, and scent, is entirely artificial; such a plastic plume is a common and sentimental domestic presence in the Hmong American community, whose childhood memories ache for such flora. In the second image, the refinery of Southeast Asian tropicalia is also pictured, though this time there are no humans and it is the Como Park Conservatory in Saint Paul, Minnesota, a living site with technological climate control, ‘preserved’ and displaced in exotic adoration. Deliberately rendered in black and white, Her draws attention to the exacerbation of statistics and the catalog in how we record and interact with the ‘Other’–that is, where the duality of citizen/alien; real/artificial; alive/dead; natural/machine; true/false is deemed the order to survive. Her further challenges this assumption; the series was developed in response to a recent traumatic and divisive incident where more than four hundred Hmong elders were swindled for money, believing Seng Xiong, a resident of Minneapolis, in his claim that he worked for the White House and the United Nations to establish a ‘Hmong’ nation, to which investors would be provided with free healthcare and education. Despite being wronged, and despite Seng Xiong’s conviction and imprisonment, many of his victims still believe him to be innocent and just another casualty of U.S. corruption. The series shares the desperation of the Hmong people and their need to affirm a safe haven for their community—to find home even in the face of criminal deception. The works speak to the human need to belong and the inalienable right to life. Her’s artistic practice may focus on the plight of the Hmong American community, but their experiences of hegemonic political monopoly and cultural disenfranchisement is similar to an alarming number of enforced post-conflict immigrant/refugees whose continuing endurance of governmental hypocrisy and the instrumentalization of assimilation is echoed in these images.

Pao Houa Her’s photographic images are never quite what they seem. Between the artificially staged and the carefully documented, Her’s highly choreographed lens focuses on the plight of her people, the Hmong, cunningly giving frame to the deceit they continue to suffer as a displaced and disenfranchised minority in the USA. Her’s practice speaks to not only the complex political condition of post-conflict displacement, faced by countless people whose local involvement in the proxy wars of others comes at a great irrevocable loss, but also to the alienation and cultural deprivation they endure as a forever ‘refugee’ community, under constant threat of racism, poverty, and deportation. Her was five years old when her family fled the calamity of the Vietnam War and its aftermath, spending several years in Thai refugee camps before settling in Minneapolis-Saint Paul. It is there that one of the largest exiled Indigenous (Hmong) communities from Lao resides, a consequence of America’s proxy war. Memories of her elders and their longing for a homeland both compel and haunt the artist’s practice. The first Hmong to graduate with a Master of Fine Arts degree from Yale University, Pao Houa Her embraces illusion and delusion as resilience in her exploration of what it means to be a Hmong American.