In this Episode of Art is Awesome, Host Emily Wilson spends time with Minnesota based photographer, Pao Houa Her.
Welcome to Art is Awesome, the show where we talk with an artist or art worker with a connection to the San Francisco Bay Area.
In this week's Episode, Emily features a discussion with artist Pao Houa Her. Pao's exhibit, 'The Imaginative Landscape,' showcases her exploration of the Hmong community's history and culture through photography and art. The artist details her inspiration from family stories, her travels back to Laos, and her work's focus on themes like home, community, and deception. They also discuss Pao's background, including her education and achievements, and her desire to tell visual stories that resonate with the Hmong community.
About Artist Pao Houa Her:
Pao Houa Her was born somewhere in the northern jungles of Laos. She fled Laos with her family when she was a baby, crossed the Mekong on her mother’s back, was fed opium to keep from crying, lived in the refugee camps in Thailand and landed in America on a silver metal bird in the mid 1980s. She is a visual artist in Minnesota who works within multiple genres of photography. Her received her BFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and her MFA from Yale University.
Visit Pao's Website: PaoHHer.com
Follow Pao on Instagram: @PaoHouaHer
For more about Pao's Exhibit: "The Imaginitive Landscape" - San Jose Museum of Art and John Michael Kohler Arts Center
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About Podcast Host Emily Wilson:
Emily a writer in San Francisco, with work in outlets including Hyperallergic, Artforum, 48 Hills, the Daily Beast, California Magazine, Latino USA, and Women’s Media Center. She often writes about the arts. For years, she taught adults getting their high school diplomas at City College of San Francisco.
Follow Emily on Instagram: @PureEWil
Follow Art Is Awesome on Instagram: @ArtIsAwesome_Podcast
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CREDITS:
Art Is Awesome is Hosted, Created & Executive Produced by Emily Wilson.
Theme Music "Loopster" Courtesy of Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
The Podcast is Co-Produced, Developed & Edited by Charlene Goto of @GoToProductions.
For more info, visit Go-ToProductions.com
2025-0805 - AIA - EP055 - Pao Houa Her
Host Emily Wilson: [00:00:00] Art is Awesome can now be heard on KSFP 1 0 2 0.5 FM every Friday at 9:00 AM and 7:00 PM Please follow the show and rate us wherever you get your podcast media. If you like what you hear from today's artist, you can find links and information about them in our show notes,
Artist Pao Houa Her: People got married in the jungle. People got sick in the jungle, people lived in the jungle, people had babies in the jungles. The jungle was this sort of setting for these Hmong families to continue living. Whether it was a month a year, people lived in the jungles and I wanted to photograph this space.
Host Emily Wilson: That's Pao Houa Her, the guest on this week's Art is Awesome.
I am your host, Emily Wilson. I'm a writer in San Francisco, often covering the arts, and I've been meeting such great people [00:01:00] that I created this biweekly podcast to highlight their work,
The Imaginative Landscape at the San Jose Museum of Art is the first comprehensive survey of Minnesota artist Pao Houa Her’s work. The exhibition examines the idea of home and includes photos and videos of Mount Shasta, jungles in Laos, poppy fields, and Hmong folk singers. The show is co-organized with the John Michael Kohler Art Center in Wisconsin with both venues showing works from the same series.
Pao got her BFA from Minnesota College of Art and Design and her MFA from Yale. She's a professor of photography at the University of Minnesota and she's shown her work in Canada, Minnesota, and Michigan. Among other places, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship and her work was in the 2022 Whitney [00:02:00] Biennial.
We met at the galleries in the San Jose Museum the day of the opening of her exhibition. In the background, you could hear the Hmong singing coming from a video in the exhibition. We talked about going back to Laos with her family a couple years ago and seeing where her father hid in the jungle, a photo series she made about a man swindling among people with the promise of a new homeland, and how she thinks of her photos as sentences and tries to tell stories with them.
Artist Pao Houa Her: As you enter the gallery, you are confronted with a backdrop. And it's an actual backdrop from a photo studio that I made in Laos, and right in front of it is a portrait of among women holding some poppy pods. And I think it like really sets the tone for the entire show. Again, really thinking [00:03:00] about sort of this idea of layering, really thinking about the idea of like portraiture, these backdrops, the artifice that are in the images.
Host Emily Wilson:
There's a series of photos of Mount Shasta Pao took in 2021.
Artist Pao Houa Her: There was a huge Hmong population that had populated in the Manchester area because of marijuana cultivation, and so it was sort of trying to figure out what, if anything, I can make of that area. And so I started photographing the landscape as a way to think about among people that were living on that land, but also as a way to really think about the history of that land too.
Host Emily Wilson: One of Pao's bodies of work is the Imaginative :andscape, which is also the title of the show. She said when she went back to Laos as an adult, it was nothing like she had pictured from her grandma's stories.
Artist Pao Houa Her: I had this imagination of what Laos [00:04:00] was, and when I actually went to Laos for the first time in 2011, Laos was absolutely nothing like what my grandmother had told me Laos was.
And so the imaginative landscape for me was a way to sort of gather information that maybe could be used in trying to create a Laos that was like my grandmother's Laos. And so these images are, once again, I've created these landscapes, these, uh, jungle scapes and then have planted my subjects like in the middle,
Host Emily Wilson: In one series of photos Pao is exploring swindling.
Artist Pao Houa Her: The work comes from a story that happened in St. Paul, Minnesota, where a Hmong man swindled among elders to the tune of like $2 million with the belief that he was gonna go and make a new lost country and people could buy into this country that he was building. And when the [00:05:00] country was built, then you could then be a founding member, right?
And so I was really interested in that idea and was trying to figure out ways in which I could talk about it through photographs, and I think that you'll start to see that there's this trend of like me really being interested in things that I'm hearing in the community, things that I'm reading about, and then ways of interpreting it via either photographs or objects.
Host Emily Wilson: One photo in the series has a woman sitting in what looks like a jungle.
Artist Pao Houa Her: At first, you don't know whether or not the plants are real or not, but upon closer examination, you start to realize that maybe the plants aren't real and that they're fake. You can then peek through the plants and you start to see sort of the backdrop.
You see where the planters are. The picture starts to break down for you. I was really interested in what are the [00:06:00] ways in which I could trick my viewers into believing that this was a jungle image.
Host Emily Wilson: In the back of the gallery are light boxes, Pao said, photos by California photographers inspired her to make them.
Artist Pao Houa Her: They all photographed the west to sort of entice settlers to move westward. And so I was really trying to think about the, the kind of landscapes that they were making. And I wanted to sort of like, how do I bring that into the work that I'm making? And for me, these light boxes made perfect sense. So I'm thinking about the light boxes as these advertorial objects.
I'm thinking about the light boxes as a sort of way to, you know, there's something really beautiful about light and the way it seduces you,
Host Emily Wilson: Pao went back to Laos with her parents and siblings in 2023.
Artist Pao Houa Her: My dad took us through the jungles of Laos, showed us where he hid [00:07:00] during the war. My mother, myself, and my father hid in these jungles.
I photographed them and was really thinking about the way in which the jungle was this sort of refuge for Hmong folks trying to escape the war, but also was the setting for Hmong lives. That continue to happen in the face of war. You know, people got married in the jungle, people got sick in the jungle, people lived in the jungle, people had babies in the jungles.
The jungle was this sort of setting for these Hmong families to continue living. Whether it was a month, two months, six months, a year, people lived in the jungles and I wanted to to photograph this space.
Host Emily Wilson: I asked Pao about the music.
Artist Pao Houa Her: The music that's playing in the background is a form of traditional folk music called Illa.It's usually a [00:08:00] call and a response, and the singers are given a prompt, and so one person sings and the other responds, and then it's this sort of back and forth that happens. I made this four channel work for San Jose. Thinking about the Hmong women in Laos and Hmong women in our community and the really thinking about like the trials and tribulations that we go through, and especially the Hmong women in Laos.
And so around the corner you'll see foue Hmong women singing back and forth to each other,
Host Emily Wilson: when they came to Minnesota in the eighties, her parents worked multiple jobs. Her father told her and her sister folk stories before bed until he found a job at night and wasn't able to.
Artist Pao Houa Her: What he did was he recorded the story so my sister and I could listen to it every night before we go to sleep.
And so we used to listen to it. And I think just listening to the stories and then [00:09:00] feeling like, um, like a deep sense of needing to preserve those stories made me want to become a writer. And then I learned really quickly that I was a really bad writer. And then also that photography in a lot of ways could be in place of writing for me, right?
And so often I, I think about my photographs as sentences, paragraphs, punctuation marks, thinking about what it means to sequence images together so they can tell a story or they could say something.
Host Emily Wilson: Pao says her parents don't really understand what she does.
Artist Pao Houa Her: I think that when I was in community college and when I was sort of thinking about completing a paralegal like associate degree, my parents were really excited about that.
And then when I completely changed trajectory and wanted to become a photographer, they were just really happy that I was like wanting to still stay in [00:10:00] school. After graduate school, I remember my dad asking me if I wanted to like become a dental hygienist and giving me a pamphlet to college in St.Paul. And so I think my parents are, although, are very, very supportive, have very little knowledge in what fine arts is and what it could possibly become and what it could possibly be. And so I think that they don't know what I do, but they, they're very proud of the fact that I teach at the university.
Host Emily Wilson: Pao has gotten a Guggenheim Fellowship and her work was included in the Whitney Biennial, but she says what means the most to her is just continuing to go to the studio and make art.
Artist Pao Houa Her: Being able to do that and being able to continue to do that and having support and help and realize a body of work or to be able to even show it is I think for me, a real gift.
And [00:11:00] so while the recognition and the exhibitions are all really, really great. The ability for me to just continue to be able to think about the work that I make and to continue to make the work that I make is like for me, the thing that I feel most proud of and that I'm most excited about,
Host Emily Wilson: PA says her work is meant primarily for the Hmong community, but sometimes it's hard for them to come and see it.
But a 2022 show at the Walker Arts Center in the Twin Cities was different.
Artist Pao Houa Her: It, for me felt like a wonderful homecoming, Hmong event was attended by a lot of Hmong folks in the community, and that felt really, really great. And it was like the first time that the Walker had that many Hmong folks in the Walker was the first time that a lot of Hmong folks were introduced to my work.
And yeah, there was something about that that [00:12:00] felt really, really great. And there was resistant before the show just because the show, the title of the show was du, which translates to Flowers of the Sky. And that is the sort of poetic term for saying. Marijuana. There was these sort of preconceived notion of what the work was gonna be, but then once they saw the light boxes and the landscape, it felt really different, you know?
And so that to me was really, really great. I don't know if I'll ever be able to have another reception that felt as great as the reception at the Walker, but that is something that I aspire to maybe do again.
Host Emily Wilson: This is three questions where I asked the guest the same three things they are. When did you know you were an artist? What's some work that's had an impact on you? And usually I ask the most creatively inspiring [00:13:00] place in the Bay Area, but since Pao lives in St. Paul, I asked her about that.
Artist Pao Houa Her: I knew I was an artist after graduate school. My first show outside of graduate school was at Franklin Art Gallery, which is a gallery that was in Minneapolis, Minnesota that has long since dismantled, but it was that first show outside of graduate school that made me feel like I really wasn't artist.
Some work and artists that has had a real impact on me would be the work of Wing Young Huie, who is a Chinese American born artist that is out of Minnesota in [00:14:00] the early nineties. He made this body of work title Frog Town, where he went around in this neighborhood in St. Paul on the weekends and would knock on doors and ask people if he would photograph them.
And it just so happened that Frogtown was one of the very first places in the Twin Cities where among, and people, Southeast Asians settled in and I discovered this work when I was in community college. My instructor said, there's this guy who's making this body of work called Frogtown. You should look at it.
I did. And it was the first time I'd seen Hmong people being photographed. Not only was he photographing Hmong people, and not only could it tell that he was photographing Hmong people, I knew that he was photographing, that he had photographed my people. I mean, literally my people. My grandmother was in the photographs, my uncles were in the photographs.
And so seeing that work really, really changed the trajectory of who I am today.[00:15:00]
I live in Minnesota and for me the most in inspiring place would be Mong Town Market. It's a Hmong bazaar in St. Paul where there are these different stalls that sell. Anything and everything, you know, you can go there and get your taxes done, you can get a haircut, you can get your nails done. You can buy Hmong clothes, you can have Hmong food.
You can literally do anything at these places. Um, but those are like, that place for me is like the most creatively inspiring for me.
Host Emily Wilson: Thank you so much to the guest today, Pao Houa Her. You can see your show, the Imaginative Landscape at the San Jose Museum of Art through February 22nd. It's also at the John Michael Kohler Art Center in Wisconsin. [00:16:00] And thank you for listening to Art is Awesome. We're taking a short break and we'll be back on September 16th.
We have some guests I'm excited about coming up, including Masako Miki, Kathy Aoki and Adrian Burrell, and we'll replay a couple episodes while we're on hiatus. One is episode six with photographer Shao Feng Hsu. He currently has a solo exhibition at the Bolinas Museum, Hold Fast, through September 21st.
Then we'll replay episode 10 with film and video artists Trina Robinson. Trina has a film in the wonderful show, Black Gold Stories Untold at Fort Point through November 2nd. As always, I continued to be stunned by the talent. creativity and hard work of Bay Area artists.[00:17:00]
Art is Awesome is a biweekly podcast coming out every other Tuesday. It's created and hosted by me, Emily Wilson. It is produced and edited by Charlene Goto of Goto Productions. It's carried on KSFP, LP 1 0 2 0.5 FM San Francisco on Fridays at 9:00 AM and 7:00 PM Our theme music is provided by Kevin McCloud with Incomptech Music.
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