Born in Laos and raised in Minnesota in a community of Hmong refugees, photographer Pao Houa Her explores the complexity of yearning for a lost homeland or an inaccessible past. “We are a people...that have historically always been run out of the countries we were residing in,” Her explains of the Hmong, who are indigenous to East and Southeast Asia. In 1983, when the artist was still a toddler, she and her family traversed the Laotian jungle to escape government persecution in the wake of the Laotian Civil War. Four decades later, Her retraced this clandestine route using Google Maps, photographing clearings where she believes her family hid along the way.
The photographs featured in Her’s installation for the Modern Window capture this landscape, which appears both idyllic and foreboding—a verdant “paradise” inflected with latent trauma. Images of poppies in her mother’s garden in Minnesota overlay one photograph. Among the Hmong, poppies symbolize a more prosperous time, when opium cultivation flourished in Laos. “For me,” Pao notes, “the poppies are a bridge merging the reality and the fiction of a land that doesn’t exist but as a dream.”
Organized by Jody Graf, Assistant Curator, MoMA PS1.