BIOGRAPHY
Michael Rikio Ming Hee Ho (b. 1996, Kamuela, Hawaiʻi) is a Japanese and Cantonese American artist raised on Hawaiʻi Island. Ho studied art at UCLA before relocating to Tokyo, where he now lives and works. His shaped, text-based paintings combine illusion and language to reflect on cultural dissonance, peripheral belonging, and the contradictions of identity. Shaped by a childhood rooted in local Hawaiian culture and diasporic tradition, Ho’s practice engages with how place is felt, how language shifts, and how cultural inheritance carries weight over time.
Through a diaristic intimacy, Ho frames short handwritten phrases against trompe-l’œil surfaces that suggest sculptural form. Informed by semiotics and sociolinguistics, he treats language as spatial architecture. Each phrase follows the curve or tilt of the canvas, folding meaning into the illusion of form. The tone remains deliberately unsettled, oscillating between sincerity and irony, vulnerability and detachment. His shaped structures emphasize containment as both a formal device and a psychological state.
Recurring themes include emotional fatigue, generational ambivalence shaped by instability, and a resistance articulated through restraint rather than assertion. Recent paintings incorporate imagery from personal memory, including Hawaiian flora and Paniolo cowboys. Rather than acting as discrete symbols, these references emerge as ambient residues that shape the work’s atmosphere through suggestion and deferral.
Ho has exhibited in Tokyo, Seoul, Taipei, New York, and Los Angeles, including presentations at Art Busan, Tokyo Gendai, and Taipei Dangdai. He is represented by Kotaro Nukaga in Tokyo.
His practice contributes to a growing interest in painting that engages language materially and emotionally, where conceptual structure and interior life remain in constant negotiation.