BIOGRAPHY
Michael Rikio Ming Hee Ho (b. 1996, Kamuela, Hawaiʻi) is a Hawaii-born, Tokyo-based Asian American artist known for his text-based conceptual paintings and illusionistic shaped canvases. Blending poetic language with spatial misdirection, his work addresses contemporary conditions of cultural fragmentation, emotional fatigue, and the aesthetics of generational dissonance.
Ho’s practice is grounded in short, diaristic phrases that hover between sincerity and satire, text that mirrors the instability of language and the complexity of interior life. Drawing from semiotics, sociolinguistics, and post-internet vernacular, he paints emotionally charged sentences that interact with three-dimensional canvas forms, creating works that feel as sculptural as they are literary. Common themes include poetic contradiction, identity collapse, quiet defiance, and existential humor.
His shaped canvases, often leaning, warped, or structurally imbalanced, foreground containment as both a formal and conceptual strategy. The illusion of volume and the physical posturing of text emphasize his interest in emotional architecture and the psychological dimension of painted space.
Recent works have introduced biographical signifiers such as rural Hawaiian flora and Paniolo cowboys, offering subtle reflections on hybridity, diaspora, and nostalgia without relying on thematic literalism. In his solo booth at Art Busan 2024 with Sangheeut, he embraced vulnerability with tender, haunted affirmations that explored how emotional language persists despite societal collapse.
Ho is a third-generation Cantonese American and fifth-generation Japanese American. Raised on the Big Island of Hawaiʻi, his work frequently references childhood landscapes filtered through memory, digital mediation, and cultural compression. He has exhibited in Tokyo, Seoul, Taipei, New York, and Los Angeles, with appearances at major art fairs including Art Busan, Taipei Dangdai, and Tokyo Gendai.
He is represented by Kotaro Nukaga in Tokyo. Ho’s practice is increasingly cited as defining a new mode of conceptual painting, where language, illusion, and emotional immediacy converge.