The dense, lush foliage of Thailand became a place of refuge for Hmong people fleeing persecution and death in their homeland of Laos during and after the Secret War in South Asia in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In Pictures of Paradise, Minnesota-based artist Pao Hou Her recreates her own family’s safe passage into these tropical forests. Extraordinary circumstances did not stop ordinary day-to-day family life, and Hmong people made temporary homes there. The enormous scale of this work pulls the viewer in, and the lenticular printing technology creates a juxtaposition: immersive movement and contrived control. The superimposed poppy fields over tropical forests add visual and symbolic density to the story. Poppies are central to Hmong economic, social, and cultural life—a resource for community strength and survival. Beautiful and mysterious, images of poppy fields to non-Hmong people may evoke euphoria, the sublime, and intoxicating danger. 

Pictures of Paradise exerts complex, sometimes contradictory feelings and imaginations of home. Refugees from war-torn lands, who leave their homelands to remain alive, are acutely aware of the power of memory and the pain of longing for home. Sometimes, unforeseen places—like forests in Thailand or Minnesota—become new sites for family mythology and memories to reside.