Artist Christopher K. Ho Finds His Place in Hong Kong

Christopher K. Ho has spent much of his career exploring the idea of being in between cultures and places. In 2022, the Hong Kong-born American artist converted the Vancouver Art Gallery’s outdoor exhibition space into a replica of the former Kai Tak Airport as filtered through the haze of memory. That installation was titled CX889, after the Cathay Pacific flight that shuttled between New York, Vancouver and Hong Kong. It recalled an earlier installation Ho had made for de Sarthe Gallery, CX888, which combined videos and deck chairs tilted back at exactly the same angle as a business class seat on the flight that so many “astronauts” took between their work in Hong Kong and their families in Canada. 

Ho describes himself as a “paradigmatic third culture kid,” referring to people who grow up in the space between the culture of their homeland or their parents and that of the new place to which they have migrated. “One result of being a third culture kid is a sense of rootlessness,” says Ho, something he says is reflected in many of his artworks that explore “migration and transnational flows of people, ideas, and capital.” 

But now that period of his life is over. In 2021, Ho boarded flight CX845 from New York and returned to Hong Kong, 45 years after he left at the age of two. Following a two-year stint in Kuala Lumpur, his family moved to Los Angeles, where Ho grew up before attending Hotchkiss, a prestigious boarding school in Connecticut. That led him to study architecture at Cornell University, then art history at Columbia University in New York, where he settled and spent the next 24 years building a practice as an artist, curator and educator. His move back to Hong Kong came when Claire Hsu stepped down as the founding director of Asia Art Archive (AAA); Ho took her place. 

What does it mean for a third culture kid to return to a home he has known mainly from a distance? That’s a question Ho has been asking himself over the past three years. Naturally enough, he has attempted to answer it through art. His new show, I Am a 70-Year-Old British Sculptor, brings 30 new sculptures and 10 new drawings to PHD Group’s rooftop art space. It’s a return to roots, with the brass and aluminium sculptures made according to the “nine-square grid” developed by architect John Hejduk in the 1950s – a theoretical exercise in designing space that is a mainstay in architecture school studios. Some of the sculptures are based on real-world buildings, like I.M. Pei’s Allied Bank Tower in Dallas, while others are more abstract, while still relating to each other in form and appearance. 

Returning to his educational foundation is a way for Ho to find his place in Hong Kong. “In New York, upholding the educator’s duty to provoke, I made work that questioned the very definitions of art – often with gestures, objects, and environments that skirted boundaries and conventions,” he says. “In Hong Kong, I am relatively unknown as an artist; the current show is my first solo since moving back over three years ago. Its aim is not to provoke, but rather to prove expertise, technique, commitment, and knowledge to an audience unfamiliar with my work.”

He elaborates on this line of thought. The ten drawings in the show are made with thousands of hand-drawn lines, which Ho describes as a “demonstration of commitment”; they’re also produced according to an “obscure, obsolete type of drawing” called a 90-degree axonometric, in which only one face and the top are visible, both true, and are hinged where they join. (Ho says this is a “demonstration of technique”). The sculptures were made through a combination of casting, laser cutting and CNC milling – a “demonstration of expertise.” And the nine-square grid is a “demonstration of knowledge.” As a newly-minted member of Hong Kong’s reverse diaspora — the overseas Chinese who return home after growing up abroad — Ho seems eager to prove his bona fides. 

“We hope the show provides a much needed additional perspective on who Chris is as an artist and the already incredible degree to which he is now contributing to the art scene here,” says PHD Group co-founder Willem Molesworth. “The work we have on display certainly represents a shift within Chris’s practice, but it’s a logical and well considered one. His practice has been developing for over two decades and a constant within his practice is responsiveness and change. As times change, as he changes, the work changes.”

What hasn’t changed is the ambiguity at the heart of Ho’s work: he asks more questions than he answers, something that seems related to the in-between nature of his own existence. In a review of Ho’s 2018 show at the Bronx Museum of Art, Aloha to the World at Don Ho Terrace, curator Hera Chan described him as “part of a generation of artists of colour who grew up in the 1990s,” someone “unable to harmonise with the language of identity politics at the time and unable to find like-minded practitioners to articulate a different relationship to being raced in America.” The review was pointedly titled, “Who Really is Christopher K. Ho?” 

That show in particular explored how Ho’s unrootedness did not begin with his family’s migration to America. His maternal grandfather was a director of the Miramar Hotel and Investment Company, founded in 1957, which grew to operate properties in Hong Kong, Honolulu and New York that paved the way for the transnational flows of business and culture that made Hong Kong the “capital of the Chinese diaspora,” to use the words of anthropologist Aihwa Ong. Hong Kong has always been a city between worlds, and so have its people. 

Still, it’s not easy to navigate between those worlds. Ho’s early years in the United States were increasingly alienating. “Los Angeles agreed less and less with me as I approached my teens,” he told the Hotchkiss alumni magazine in 2022. That precipitated his enrollment at the boarding school and his further studies on the East Coast, where he found kinship with the international students he encountered, something he describes as a “third cultural bond.” In an interview with journalist Dawn Chan, conducted over the summer of 2020 — amidst Black Lives Matter protests in New York and the political crackdown that followed the 2019 protests in Hong Kong — Ho described reckoning with the upheaval in both of his home cities, the racism he had encountered in his educational and artistic career, and his burgeoning desire to move back to Asia.

“On a personal level, [moving back to Hong Kong] was the logical outcome of my own search for a home culture,” he says. “The irony here of course is that Hong Kong is the metropolitan equivalent of a third culture kid. Like them, Hong Kong is able to relate quickly to, and code-switch to accommodate, many cultures – an advantage in an age of colonialism and global capitalism alike. Yet this chameleon-like ability means identity crises regularly challenge our city, and inhabitants collectively cannot define Hong Kong confidently and consistently.”

Studying the chameleon is what Ho aims to do both in his artistic practice and in his role at AAA. Next year, the archive will co-publish a book on Hong Kong’s recent art history written by artist, curator and critic Oscar Ho Hing-kay. It’s “one of scandalously few” books on the topic, he explains. “Hong Kong is a case study in the passage from colony to financial centre to, recently, in an era of de-globalisation, a regional hub. We ourselves are in an ideal position to narrate first-hand these broad shifts and the cultural transformations that accompany them. At best, Hong Kong embraces its role as an invaluable cultural resource and a privileged voice; at worst, we are a stop on a tourist’s itinerary.”

Ho thinks back to the idea he had of Hong Kong when he was growing up. “The stories about Hong Kong I heard from family members were mostly set in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, before my parents moved to the States,” he says. Through the tumult of those decades, Hong Kong became the global economic centre it is today.  “That narrow lens on Hong Kong meant that I always felt those years were the city’s most intense and exciting for business. I believe that we are now embarking on a similarly intense and exciting period for art.”

The same could be said for Ho himself. “He is an important organiser within the artistic community,” says Molesworth. “He is collaborative in much of his practice and a renaissance man, working not only as an artist and art administrator, but also as an editor, a curator, a teacher, and more. His work is deeply rooted in the realities of our contemporary era and nonetheless maintains a timeless and beautiful aesthetic that speaks across generations. In short, his practice is well researched, highly practised, unencumbered by established norms, and resonant with narratives from the region.”

Christopher K. Ho: I am a 70-year old British sculptor runs until November 30, 2024 at PHD group. For more information visit here.