A plaintive voice echoes across the main gallery of the San Jose Museum of Art, where Pao Houa Her’s exhibit “The Imaginative Landscape” is on view. A Conversation Between 4 Hmong Women is playing in a video installation in the adjacent room.

The artist places each woman separately, in the center of their respective frames. They’re projected onto a long wall, four in a row. They’re singing kwv txhiaj, a Hmong oral tradition, to each other in a chanted, call-and-response conversation. Not knowing the language, I ask Her if I’d projected my own sense of sorrow onto this form of sung poetry.

“One of the women I worked with, I learned that she was single, and that she will probably never be married because of the profession that she has chosen—singing,” Her explains. In Laos, the woman is a

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