“It has this idea of a work also being half. Half out, half on the margins, but halfway in. And, actually, that kind of mediating position of curating is one that I still believe in. I don’t even in art practice believe that it’s entirely beyond the frame or subversive. I think that this kind of half and half out position is more useful and frankly more realistic.” – Christopher K. Ho
Christopher K. Ho | Image courtesy of the artist and Tatler Asia
Christopher K. Ho (b. Hong Kong, 1974) is an artist, educator, and organizer based in New York, Hong Kong, and Telluride, Colorado. His practice encompasses making, organizing, writing, and teaching. He is known for materially exquisite objects that draw from learned material about, and lived encounters with, power and otherness in an unevenly decolonized, increasingly networked world.
Christopher K. Ho, “Art & Family”, 2014 | Image courtesy of the artist and Sunpride Foundation
Moved to Kuala Lumpur in 1976, then to the United States in 1978, Ho grew up in Los Angeles, California, and spent his high school years at the Hotchkiss boarding school in Connecticut. Joined Asia Art Archive (AAA) as the Executive Director in 2021, Ho received his BFA in architecture and BS in history of architecture and urbanism from Cornell University, and his MPhil in art history from Columbia University. Prior to joining AAA, he served on the faculty of the Rhode Island School of Design from 2000 to 2018, and taught at Cranbrook Academy of Art, the Maryland Institute College of Art, and the Pratt Institute.
Christopher K. Ho, “CX 889”, 2022 | Image courtesy of the artist
His multi-component projects have been exhibited at CCS Bard Hessel Museum, Asia Society Hong Kong, the RISD Museum, UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, ParaSite, the Guangdong Times Museum, the Queens Museum, the Cranbrook Art Museum, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, Storm King Art Center, and in the Incheon Biennial and the Busan Biennale. Alongside producing objects and images, Ho writes often for arts publications and creates performative lectures. He has written for Yishu, Artforum China, ArtAsiaPacific, November, Modern Painters, ArtReview, and PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art.
Christopher K. Ho, “I Endorse Patriarchy”, 2016 | Image courtesy of the artist
The presence of both aesthetic and intellectual in his art practice
Ho wants to be involved in the arts in many ways in the field of art. His art practice encompasses making, organizing, writing, and teaching. No matter being an artist, a curator, an art historian, or a teacher, aesthetic and intellectual endeavor are equally important in his art life. As an artist, he is interested in abstract expressionism paintings and site-specific art under the inspiration by Marjorie Reid at the Hotchkiss boarding school and the atmosphere of the long and strong tradition on site specificity at Cornell University. As an art historian and a teacher, he started his rich intellectual endeavor after stumbling into Hal Foster’s theory and criticism seminar in New York during the 1990s.
Christopher K. Ho, “Christopher K. Ho 2010 / Hirsch E.P. Rothko 2001, (No. 26)”, 2010 | Image courtesy of the artist, Winkleman Gallery and Hyperallergic
Lectures made him realize the malleability of history, including the number of ways we can recount the same story using the same objects, and recognizing the kind of two-way street that history is. Ho still believes that it is still a very powerful tool for contemporary artists and curators who could make work that would realign the work that came behind it, highlighting works that came before them chronologically and reformulating it. Meanwhile, reading and writing are the important part of his artistic practice, a method to organize and formulate ideas that might eventually become a piece. Ho often thinks both writing and diagramming as his two go-to tools that would be equivalent.
Critical, historical, and pedagogical all at once
“Art can have content, and can deliver that content, and can be talked about and argued about and discussed.” Ho often returns to the themes of identity and belonging within his work.
Christopher K. Ho, “Art & Family”, 2014, exhibition view of “Any distance between us” at the RISD Museum, 2021-2022 | Image courtesy of the artist and RISD Museum
“Art & Family” (2014) consists of a letterpress title page and lyrics after a 1934 edition of Rachmaninoff’s “Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini”; sanded and stained Shaker duet music stand; acoustic guitar; and Grady Owens on vocals and guitar on opening night, March 8, 2014. It has been exhibited in “Any distance between us” at the RISD Museum from July 2021 to March 2022, exploring the power and significance of intimate relationships in a selection of artworks made between 1954 and 2021.
Christopher K. Ho, “Art & Family”, 2014 | Image courtesy of the artist and Sunpride Foundation
The work was structured around a wooden armature that resembles a music stand with two shelves, with a fictional “Art & Baby” composition booklet on one shelf, and a list of acts of service both large and small on the other.
Christopher K. Ho, “Art & Family”, 2014 | Image courtesy of the artist and Sunpride Foundation
Ho’s art is critical, historical, and pedagogical all at once. He and his partner were debating over whether to have a baby, engaged in what he calls an “inane duet” of meting out acts of service as affectionate currency. Ho made his own list detailing how particularly well and intimately he knows his partner and what his partner likes and needs, both in terms of everyday tasks and grand gestures.