Pao Houa Her Paj qaum ntuj / Flowers of the Sky
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis 28 July – 22 January
Pao Houa Her’s photographic practice has long engaged with Hmong communities, family stories and significant moments of encounter and exchange between Hmong who continue to live in Southeast Asia and the Hmong diaspora in the United States. For the work in her most recent solo exhibition, she travelled to the volcanic highlands surrounding Mount Shasta in Northern California, where Hmong farmers put traditional high-altitude growing practices, honed in the mountains of Southeast Asia, to use. A black-and-white floor-to-ceiling portrait of the dormant volcano sets the stage for the show: the snow-capped peak looms large behind an array of freestanding cutout photographs of red opium poppies that rise from the floor. Once a cash crop for Laotian Hmong farmers, the poppies, however, are not the eponymous flowers of the sky. The epithet instead refers to cannabis, legally cultivated in California since 2016, and the resulting ‘green rush’ that brought Hmong Americans to Shasta.
The quasi-theatrical opening gives way to two series of restrained black-and-white photography. Referencing satellite surveillance imagery, Her shows an incomplete grid of 16 square aerial views of the area: juniper-dotted desertscapes alternate with small cultivated plots of cannabis. The gaps in the grid evoke what cannot be seen from afar: the texture of sand, the sagebrush thickets, the small signs of human habitation in this inhospitable place. In untitled, Mt. Shasta series (2021–22), the land comes closer. On largescale lightboxes, gnarly trees twist across arid soil. Blackened from wildfires, limbs tangle with derelict fencing or snag empty plastic bags. Irrigation hoses drape across branches or wind through sand and snow. Evidence of human-made structures is subtle but nonetheless undercuts any trace of romanticism.
A two-channel video installation titled Kuv nco koj, rov qab los (I miss you, come back) (2022) shapes the exhibition’s mood: two vocalists, one filmed in northern Minnesota, the other in Laos, perform Hmong song poetry. A wall didactic explains the genre, its form, history and content. On one screen, a woman sings of her longing to return to a distant tropical home; on the other, a man who left California for Laos expresses his desire for a second chance in the United States. Though no subtitles are provided, their plaintive voices and sombre miens convey the melancholy of exile that does not end with return. Her’s work eschews nostalgia but probes the space between distance and the desire to belong, perhaps exacerbated by the intimate ties between Hmong people and the land. Pensive, the exhibition conjures a visual poetics of loss and longing that is punctuated by a practical resilience that manifests in Her’s images.
Christina Schmid