This article is part of our Fine Arts & Exhibits special section on how museums, galleries and auction houses are embracing new artists, new concepts and new traditions.
MINNEAPOLIS — In a darkened gallery at the Walker Art Center, the face of the photographer Pao Houa Her is aglow as she points to key moments in her new black-and-white Mount Shasta landscape series.
There’s the charred tree, bent over and split down the middle; a water hose snaking through dry brush; and plastic-bag planters with bare, dry stems reaching out like bony fingers — evidence of a cannabis country, in this case, an area cultivated by a Hmong community of marijuana farmers who have relocated to Northern California.
The large-format images are backlit, displayed in lightboxes, as if they were advertisements at an airport or bus stop selling a peculiar kind of paradise.
From a two-channel video on display, the longing voices of a man and woman singing a kwv txhiaj, a traditional Hmong tonal poem, fill the room. Over these voices, Ms. Her describes this series of seven photos as a subversion of what the landscape photographers Timothy O’Sullivan and Carleton Watkins, as well as members of Group f/64 like Ansel Adams, were doing before her — selling the West with images of grand, pristine landscapes.
“The trees are so scorched. You can really see that this is not a land of abundance. It’s a land of restriction, of desolation. There is always something uncanny that reminds me that this is not a romantic or pictorial image,” said Matthew Villar Miranda, the visual arts curatorial fellow at the Walker, of the photos. The fellow, who worked closely with Ms. Her, contrasted her images with those of the f/64 photographers. “Instead of the romanticized panoramas, there’s tangled cords and irrigation hoses, weathered trees, and it’s much more of a story of survival than it is about white dominance and entitlement over the West.”
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“These photographers are photographing these vast landscapes and enticing settlers to come to the West,” Ms. Her said. “I’m thinking of that, but I’m also thinking about the realities of the place.” Or more specifically, Ms. Her uses the Hmong word “tebchaw,” which translates to “land-place,” which she says evokes meanings of a homeland or promised land.
For Ms. Her, a Hmong American, the realities of this place — a 200-acre subdivision in Northern California’s cannabis country — and the realities of tebchaw, are at the heart of this exhibition, “Pao Houa Her: Paj qaum ntuj/Flowers of the Sky,” which runs through Jan. 22. The name, “Paj qaum ntuj,” is a poetic Hmong term for marijuana, “flowers of the sky;” in the show, Ms. Her explores what she calls parallels, or “history repeating itself” between the heyday of Hmong opium cultivation in Laos in the decades before the Vietnam War and the current Hmong cultivation of cannabis in the United States, particularly in California.
She also links Laos with California and Minnesota, the states with the largest Hmong populations; this connection can be seen in the opening piece: A 10-foot tall backdrop printed with a black-and-white photo of Mount Shasta and, at its foot, bright red photo cutouts of opium poppies — poppies Ms. Her grew in Minnesota, where she’s based. To improve access for the Hmong community, Ms. Her and the curators used the Hmong language first in the all the exhibition text and photo captions, with English text as supplementary.
“It’s the in-between,” Ms. Her said of the area around Mount Shasta. “For Hmong folks in America, it’s the closest thing to Laos without having to go to Laos. For older Hmong folks, it’s a chance of reliving the opium cultivation era.”
“This show is totally about defining home,” Mx. Miranda, the fellow, who uses a gender neutral courtesy title, noted. “All of Pao’s work has to do with innovative and inventive ways that communities have been able to conjure and articulate home.”
Ms. Her originally got the idea for “Paj qaum ntuj” after reading the 2017 New York Times article “California’s ‘Green Rush’ Takes Hmong Back to Their Opium-Growing Roots,” which recounted how approximately 1,000 Hmong families had come to this part of the state to grow marijuana.
The article lit Ms. Her up, flooding her with memories of her parents, grandparents and elders recalling the lucrative opium-growing operations in Laos in the years leading up to the Vietnam War. Ms. Her was born in Laos, and as she tells it, her family escaped a war-torn Laos when she was an infant — having to rub opium on her gums to keep her quiet as they fled for refugee camps in Thailand — and eventually relocated to the Twin Cities in the mid-1980s.
“My dad would sometimes talk about what the opium operation was like in the 1950s and 1960s,” Ms. Her said. “He talked about the amount of money that people were making and silver bars, and what they would do with the silver bars, and they would bury them in the ground.”
Now, Ms. Her — who has family connections to the community in California — says the Hmong marijuana farmers are again burying money in the ground. She describes more parallels in time, place and practice: The agricultural skill and resilience of the Hmong, to take tough land — the area near Shasta has been marred by lava fires and water shortages — and make it lucrative; and the ability to form tightknit communities under these circumstances.
Until the pandemic, Ms. Her predominantly shot intimate and vibrantly colorful portraits of Hmong immigrants and first-generation Hmong Americans, often among plastic flowers — common in Hmong portraiture — or against fake backdrops of Laotian landscapes. Dozens of these images were on view in the 2022 Whitney biennial. When Covid-19 hit, Ms. Her had to adjust her practice, as she could no longer be close to her photo subjects. She turned her attention back to The Times article and to the land, first through Google Earth, and then by visiting and photographing the subdivision in California on multiple visits from 2020 to 2022.
Using Google Earth, Ms. Her zoomed in on the subdivision near Mount Shasta. Through some study, she was able to identify shapes and patterns in the landscape as rows of marijuana plants, greenhouses, and kiddie pools, which are used as a source to water the crops. She took screenshots; a collection of these images appear near the entrance to the exhibition, and much of their content is repeated again in the lightbox photos. None of the still images feature people so that the identities of the marijuana growers could be protected.
Tying together these images is the two-channel video of the kwv txhiaj, titled “Kuv nco koj, rov qab los (I miss you, come back),” Ms. Her’s first moving image piece and the only color, besides the cutout poppies, in the whole show. On the left screen, a Hmong woman from Laos — a family friend of Ms. Her’s — stands in a green field in northern Minnesota, singing in Hmong about longing for her home country. On the right screen, against a lush jungle in Laos, a Hmong man who had lived in America but returned to Laos, sings about the American dream. While Ms. Her gave both subjects prompts, in the tradition of the kwv txhiaj, the poem’s content is always improvised. To Ms. Her’s surprise, both used a Hmong phrase that translates to “the heart desires, but the voice can never speak it.”
“I’m really interested in this longing for the idolized American dream; this longing to go back home to a land that isn’t ours, that is a home that was never ours,” Ms. Her said. “Desire is a running theme in all the works I’ve ever made.”
