To support the exhibition during the Covid-19 safety measures, we have been working closely with Pao Houa Her and guest curator Godfre Leung to present an online program featuring Her’s work.

The public art project After the Fall of Hmong Tebchaw can be viewed in ten bus shelters around Vancouver from March 30 to June 14. Please refer to the Google map on this page for locations. The eleventh photograph, to be exhibited in Or’s front window, is reproduced here.

Hmong-American artist Pao Houa Her takes a kaleidoscope to photographic portraiture. Foreground and background reverse, alternate, bifurcate, and lead their viewers on scavenger hunts and wild goose chases. Her’s photographs, one might say, are ungrounded.

Over the last decade, Hmong-American artist Pao Houa Her has explored the diasporic condition of her community after its escape as refugees from the conflicts following the American War in Vietnam. Emplotment features new and recent work on the slippery Hmong concept tebchaw (literally land-place, but variously used to denote region, nation-state, home, or homeland).

Green Rush (2020), a new scent-based installation, reflects on the nostalgia for the Hmong’s mid-twentieth-century prosperity in Laos, intergenerational transmission of Hmong agricultural practices, and new forms of Hmong wealth in diaspora. It takes its title from a 2017 New York Times article on the recent growth in Hmong participation in marijuana farming, “California’s ‘Green Rush’ Takes Hmong Back to Their Opium-Growing Roots.”

Accompanying this new work is a public art project adapted from Her’s photographic series After the Fall of Hmong Tebchaw (2017–present). The series depicts elders in a Hmong seniors centre flanked by artificial plants, following conventions of Hmong portraiture, and a tropical plant environment in a conservatory. Both settings are in St. Paul, Minnesota, home to the world’s largest urban Hmong population. For this exhibition, the photographs will be displayed in transit shelters around Vancouver. Anchoring these dispersed images is a photograph of the Laotian jungle—intimated by the artificial plants and the tropical plant environment—exhibited in Or Gallery’s street facing front window.

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Emplotment is a formal term used by historians and literary critics to describe the foundation of all histories as kinds of storytelling. In this exhibition, it also alludes to the pursuit of tebchaw in the Hmong imagination (finding a land-place). As Pao Houa Her states: “The idea of having our own land has been a longstanding desire of older Hmong folks. I want to explore this desire for homeland, to make a body of work that tells the history of the Hmong people, their displacement from the war, arriving and living here in America, this desire to ‘go back’ to the make believe of this country or what this country means, or to remake it in new locations.”

Emplotment is Pao Houa Her’s first exhibition in Western Canada.

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This exhibition is the first installment of UNSTATELY, a yearlong series of projects on statehood and statelessness curated by Godfre Leung.

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Sponsors/partners: Canada Council for the Arts, Capture Photography Festival, City of Vancouver

PRESS:

Canadian Art 1

Canadian Art 2

Vie Des Arts (30 June 2020): Pao Houa Her – Emplotment by Joni Low

Georgia Straight (27 February 2020) Robin Laurence: Spring Arts Preview 2020 visual arts critics’ picks: Drink in the diversity at the season’s exhibits