Michael Ho on Identity, Memory and Belonging

Description

Michael Rikio Ming Hee Ho’s and i love you dearly concludes his international artist residency at Hart Haus, presenting a new body of shaped-canvas works where poetry, text and painting converge. Treating language as a physical material, Ho reimagines the canvas as a site for negotiating nostalgia, distance and belonging; phrases and fragments surface like notes to self, tracing how once-familiar landscapes persist and distort in memory over time.

Born and raised in Hawaii and shaped by a transpacific trajectory through Tokyo and Hong Kong, Ho draws on his Cantonese heritage and multilingual background to explore identity as something partial, inherited and constantly in flux. Having studied fine art at the University of California, Los Angeles under influential artists such as Barbara Kruger and Adrian Wong, he has developed a distinct visual language in which words carry emotional weight as much as meaning — an instrument that can console, unsettle and stabilise.