Pao Houa Her's exhibit "The Imaginative Landscape" is featured at the San Jose Museum of Art, highlighting Hmong women's experiences. A video installation shows four women singing kwv txhiaj, emphasizing the cultural significance and challenges faced by these musicians. The main gallery includes Her's large-scale photo series, where she adopts a sculptural approach. Using colors and textures, her works convey depth and meaning. The series Pictures of Paradise, lacking human presence, suggests a photographer's hidden perspective. Her employs lenticular prints to create a sense of dimensionality in her artwork, activating viewers' perception.
The artist places each woman separately, in the center of their respective frames. They're projected onto a long wall, four in a row. They're singing kwv txhiaj, a Hmong oral tradition, to each other in a chanted, call-and-response conversation.
In Laos, the woman is a revered singer. But in the Hmong community, men do not consider female kwv txhiaj singers to be desirable partners. This conversation between the four of them is about the trials and tribulations of what it means to be Hmong women in my community.
Colors and textures add depth and meaning to the landscapes and portraits. In untitled (real opium, behind opium backdrop, 2020), Her creates layers within her own visual language by arranging flowers in front of a backdrop that's printed with flowers.
Her made lenticular prints for the series as a way 'to activate' the viewer to give them 'this perception of depth.' Lenticular images are digitally sliced into a foreground, middleground and background before being printed on a special paper.
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