Pao Houa Her: My Grandfather Turned into a Tiger... and Other Illusions

(Paperback)

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Pao Houa Hers first major monograph,My Grandfather Turned into a Tiger and Other Illusions, explores the fundamental concepts of home and belonging: illusion, desire, and loss.

Hers work draws inspiration from a myriad of sources: apocryphal family tales; portraits of the artists community and self; and reimagined landscapes, with Minnesota and Northern California standing in for Laos. The work invokes a compelling and personal cosmology grounded in the traditions and contemporary metaphors of the Hmong diasporic community.My Grandfather Turned into a Tigerbrings together four of the artists major series, including the eponymous body of work that reimagines her familys history before leaving Laos. Other work deals with a scandal within the Hmong community in which hundreds of elders were swindled as part of a fraudulent investment scheme built around the promise of a new Hmong homeland. In another series, tonally rich black-and-white still lifes of silk flowers collected by her mother are presented alongside images of flowers that adorn the digitally manipulated, hyper-colored popular backdrops used in Hmong photo studios and on dating apps. This beautifully designed monograph showcases Hers keen eye on the line between ersatz and authenticity; as the artist has stated, photography is a truth if you want it to be a truth.

My Grandfather Turned into a Tigeris the result of the Next Step Award, a partnership between Aperture and Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York, in collaboration with the 7|G Foundation.

Author Bio

Pao Houa Her (born in Laos, 1982) is a Hmong American artist and assistant professor in photography and moving images at the University of Minnesota. She holds an MFA in photography from the Yale University School of Art (2012) and a BFA in photography from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (2009). Her's work has been presented as a solo exhibition at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis in 2022-23 and she was included as part of the Whitney Biennial in 2022. In 2023, Her was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is represented by the Bockley Gallery, Minneapolis. Kong Pheng Pha is assistant professor of critical Hmong studies and women's, gender, and sexuality studies at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. He is currently working on two books, including a forthcoming monograph tentatively titled Queer Refugeeism: Constructions of Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Hmong Diaspora. Kao Kalia Yang is a Hmong American writer and the author of numerous books, including The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir (2005), and Somewhere in the Unknown World (2020). She is also a recipient of the A. P. Anderson Award for her contributions to Minnesota's cultural and artistic life, and a Soros, McKnight, and Guggenheim fellowship. Mai Der Vang is an author and poet. She is the author of Yellow Rain (Graywolf Press, 2021), winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, an American Book Award, and was a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. She currently teaches in the Creative Writing MFA Program at Fresno State University. Audrey Sands is an independent curator and photo historian. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a curatorial fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Henry Luce/ACLS Fellowship in American Art. From 2019 to 2022, she was the Norton Family Assistant Curator of Photography at the Center for Creative Photography (CCP) in Tucson, Arizona, a joint appointment with the Phoenix Art Museum.