BIOGRAPHY
Michael Rikio Ming Hee Ho (b. 1996, Kamuela, Hawaiʻi) is a Hawaii-born, Tokyo-based artist whose shaped, text-based paintings use illusion and language to map emotional and cultural dissonance. Through a diaristic intimacy, Ho frames short handwritten phrases against trompe-l’œil surfaces that suggest sculptural form.
Informed by semiotics and sociolinguistics, Ho approaches language as spatial structure. Each phrase follows the curve or tilt of the canvas, becoming inseparable from its physical setting. The tone of the text remains deliberately unstable. It wavers between comfort and critique, sincerity and distance. His shaped forms emphasize containment as both a visual device and a psychological condition.
Common threads include emotional fatigue, generational hesitation, and the aesthetics of quiet defiance. Recent paintings incorporate references to Hawaiian flora and Paniolo cowboys, drawing on personal memory and cultural complexity without collapsing into biography. These motifs appear not as symbols but as atmospheric residue, functioning in parallel with the text.
Ho is third-generation Cantonese American and fifth-generation Japanese American. Raised on Hawaiʻi Island, his work reflects a lived experience of linguistic drift, peripheral belonging, and hybrid cultural space. He 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 are held in careful tension.