Pao Houa Her on America’s War in Vietnam, 50 Years Later
Pao Houa Her is one of eight artists invited by Emily Watlington and Alex Greenberger for Art in America to reflect in their own words on the American War in Vietnam fifty years after the official US military defeat and withdrawal in April 1975. The writers bring attention to past acts of resistance, such as the expansive Art Strike Against racism, sexism, repression, and war that “uprooted the New York art world for one day” on May 22, 1970, as well as present day programming, such as a series at Performance Space New York that centered Vietnamese artists within a global conversation around art-making and censorship.
Considering the collective strategies of protest in 1970 as “hard to imagine happening today, even as war, mass shootings, and police brutality have hardly abated,” the writers highlight the work of artists who explore “not only policies and massacres but the long tail of the war’s aftershocks, which have reverberated for generations.” Their selection of artists are those whose “new formal strategies for representing war and its ramifications might enable us to learn from history through richer kinds of conversations, and to form solidarities.”
Pao Houa Her, a HMong-American artist based in Minnesota, speaks about her recent lenticular series, Pictures of paradise (2022–2024) and her earlier photographic series, Attention (2012–2015) which incites critical engagement with HMong histories of the American War in Vietnam, including the Secret War in Laos (1960–75) – a highly covert operation across HMong homelands led by the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency.
Her became aware of this hidden history during her MFA studies at Yale when visiting Minnesota for her uncle’s funeral. She inquired with her father why U.S. military protocols were performed. His answer exposed the Secret War and the collective organization of HMong soldiers to self-recognize, decorate, and honor one another, which was the genesis of the Attention series.
Her speaks to Greenberger: “I started studying portrait photography, both in the United States and Laos, and I asked: What are the ways I can reinsert these men into history? You might think these men are very much a part of the United States Military, but then there are these nuances. One wears a Purple Heart, but no HMong elder men ever received a Purple Heart. These men want basic rights, but because they are not official American veterans, they will never have them. They’ve very rarely been recognized—there is a plaque at Arlington Cemetery that recognizes the HMong people, but you have to search for it. At the end of the day, this work is about the effect this war has had on this HMong community.”
Relating her series to present policies in the US, Her continues, “I’m really interested in histories that have been forgotten, because the HMong people have been written out of history. It’s something I’ve thought about a lot this year, which marks the 50th anniversary of the HMong people’s arrival in the US. In the last few months, ICE has been entering our communities, wrecking families, and sending HMong people back to Laos.”
Pao Houa Her is amongst colleagues Tiffany Chung, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Alison Nguyen, Anh Vo, Tammy Nguyen, Thu Van Tran, and Vũ Đức Toàn.