BIO
Michael Rikio Ming Hee Ho (born in 1996 in Hawaii) is a Cantonese, Japanese-American artist practicing in Tokyo. Ho graduated summa cum laude with a BA in fine arts from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2018. Ho’s works frequently use a combination of symbolic imagery and bold-type texts that are provocative or confronting when they are stand-alone but ambiguously complex when combined – the result being an opaque social commentary of absurdist and comical scale that puts the viewer in a position of interpretation.
At first view, Ho’s oeuvre of works can be seemingly preaching and discordant. However, it is worthwhile to question the origins of such experiences the work triggers. His works are often composed of found or self-authored textual phrases intended to provoke but not to sermonize. The works are unapologetically material in their production, and the human presence of the artist is apparent in the hand-painted texts and imperfect scars from the manual stenciling process, which alludes to an artist, who, like all of us, feels ever so lost in the many layers of the social sublime.
The “deliberate realism” may be Ho’s attempt to be humble about fine art’s purpose in this world. In essence, Ho’s works ask the viewer to share his concerned gaze, as he wanders in and out of the institutional and constructivist curtains, we often choose to ignore. Vulnerability may not be the initial impression one has of Ho’s work, but his commitment to the viewer extends to a certain resolution about who he is as an individual in the contemporary social landscape.