BIO

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Michael Rikio Ming Hee Ho (born 1996, Hawaii) is a Cantonese, Japanese American artist currently practicing in Tokyo. Ho is represented by Tokyo International Gallery and also a member of Shinokubo UGO. Ho graduated summa cum laude with a BA in fine arts from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2018. In the UCLA art department, Ho worked under and among the department's artists/professors: Barbara Kruger, Lari Pittman, Andrea Fraser, Catherine Opie, Adrian Wong, Adrian Saxe, Mary Kelly, and Silke Otto-Knapp. At the end of 2018, he moved to Tokyo, Japan and began showing work in Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Los Angeles.

 

Focusing on the visual semantics and quasi didacticism, his paintings and sculptures take from fleeting moments of American and Japanese pop culture, investigating the more intricate ability for painting to engage in a contentious, active conversation with the viewer. Oscillations between aspects of identity, mass culture, and absurdism constructs a platform of ambiguity. Receivership becomes an intrinsic performative act for these works, such that the viewer's response is indexical of whether the work is read as an investigation outside or within art itself. The subject of this body of work becomes political while the content itself is not.

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