Pao Houa Her was only three years old when her family, of the ethnic Hmong group, fled Laos. At the time, communists and the Royal Lao government were fighting each other in the 1959–75 Secret War, each backed by proxies and allies of the Cold War superpowers. Like many Hmong refugees and veterans who battled against the Laotian communists, the Hers ended up in St. Paul, Minnesota. Brought up in the United States in a Hmong community, the photographer felt conflicting pressures to simultaneously be as American as possible and to adhere to Hmong traditions. That tension continues to pervade her creative practice, in which she contemplates her insider-outsider relationship to her birthplace.
Reflecting Her’s simultaneous remove and connection to instrument while standing in a field of opium poppies, a major cash crop in northern Laos. In another 2019 piece, an old lady is sat between two potted plants in front of a deliberately wrinkled fabric backdrop reproducing a poppy field, a facsimile that similarly evokes Her’s indirect recollection of her birth country.
