‘The Imaginary Landscape’: Pao Houa Her’s Complex Images

You might encounter the art before you even reach the museum . Wheatpasted images from Pao Houa Her: The Imaginative Landscape , Her’s first major survey — and first California show ever — can be found throughout downtown San José. They appear on the plywood covering a parking garage’s wall, on a temporary barrier at a construction site, and on abandoned storefronts.

If images dispersed across disused spaces resemble a diaspora, that’s intentional. Diaspora and how we construct homeland from a distance is the heart of The Imaginative Landscape , co-organized and simultaneously co-presented by the San José Museum of Art and the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin.

Shortly after Pao Houa Her was born in 1982 in northern Laos, her parents fled the ongoing viole