Pao Houa Her: The Imaginative Landscape Opens at the San José Museum of Art

A survey encompassing seven photographic series and new video work from nearly 20 years of Pao Houa Her’s career opened July 11 at the San José Museum of Art. The Imaginative Landscape is co-organized with the John Michael Kohler Arts Center (JMKAC) in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, whose own gallery presentation (March 15–August 31) is accompanied by offsite community installations open through early February 2026. 

The exhibition in San José features works from series such as My Mother’s Flowers, After the Fall of Hmong Teb Chaw, and the eponymous series The Imaginative Landscape. Arrayed across the gallery walls and throughout sites downtown, these images play with the line between reality and memory, revealing their constructed natures in the form of studio backdrops, props, and literally shifting landscapes in the form of lenticular prints. Others reference Hmong diasporic life in the U.S., such as those of Hmong American farmers in the Mt. Shasta region of California.

The San José presentation also debuts A Conversation Between 4 Hmong Women, a new video installation in which four singers lament gendered expectations and their personal experiences and tensions under patriarchy. The call and response exchange between the women expands upon Her’s exploration of the poetic improvisational oral tradition of kwv txhiaj.

Read more about the exhibition from Forbes, KQED, and Vogue. An exhibition catalog is forthcoming.