PAO HOUA HER
Expo Chicago 

4.9–4.12.2026
Chicago

Bockley Gallery is pleased to participate for the second consecutive year in Expo Chicago, which brings together contemporary and modern art galleries at Navy Pier’s Festival Hall, this year taking place from April 9–12, 2026. 

In the Galleries section (Booth 205), Bockley features a powerful solo presentation by Pao Houa Her, a Hmong-American artist based in Minnesota. A selection of portraits from her photographic series, Attention, incites critical engagement with Hmong histories of the Vietnam War. Today, over fifty years after the war and over a decade after its creation, Attention continues to call us to witness. 

Part of the Vietnam War, the Secret War (1960–75) was a highly covert operation across Hmong homelands in Laos led by the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA recruited, trained, and armed an estimated 50,000 Hmong soldiers to interrupt North Vietnamese supply lines, rescue downed U.S. soldiers, and fight against the People’s Army of Vietnam and Lao People’s Liberation Army. Thousands of Hmong soldiers lost their lives alongside 35,000 Hmong civilians. The U.S. defeat and withdrawal from the region in 1975 left Hmong allies abandoned and in danger, and led to a massive refugee crisis. Ninety percent of survivors, including the artist and her family, eventually settled in the U.S.

Her became aware of this hidden history at an uncle’s funeral, where U.S. military protocols were performed. After inquiring, she learned the burial rites and trumpet songs were self-taught via YouTube, and decorated military uniforms were second-hand, self-sourced on eBay. Despite decades of advocacy, Hmong veterans remain largely unacknowledged and denied even basic federal benefits. Groups of Hmong veterans gather privately in informal spaces to solemnly honor each other’s heroism. 

Her began to ask what mechanisms allow the invisibilising of these histories? What drives individuals and communities to want the official recognition of the U.S. military? With the assistance of her father, who also fought in the Secret War, Her set out to listen to and photograph willing Hmong veterans. 

Using a mobile studio in community centers, funeral homes, and residences in Minnesota and Wisconsin, Her created portraits of thirty-one veterans. She offered each man a portrait according to their own wishes in exchange for her portraits that borrow symbolic and aesthetic tropes from nineteenth-century portraits of American generals and Civil War soldiers in the U.S. National Portrait Gallery. Placed in gilded frames, the veterans remain anonymous for respect and safety, and to convey and resist the racism, denial, and erasure within imperialist U.S. policies. Works in the Attention series have been widely exhibited and collected including by Whitney Museum of American Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Singapore Art Museum, MAIIAM, National Gallery of Art, Des Moines Art Center, Minnesota Museum of American Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Navy Pier 
Booth 205