Winkleman Gallery is very
pleased to present Regional Painting, our second solo exhibition by New
York artist Christopher K. Ho. In this richly layered show, Ho calibrates
fiction, fact, and figment into a precarious universe, at the center of which is
one Hirsch E.P. Rothko, an anagram of the
artist’s name. The invention of and creations by this shadow
artist—a performance, twelve paintings, and a ghostwritten
memoir—deploy conceptual art against itself to liberate Ho from its
self-imposed constraints, and collectively propose regional painting as a viable
model for contemporary
practice.
License Plate Shed (2009-10) frames the exhibition. Part endurance
art, part experiment, part polemic, it consists of Ho’s yearlong sojourn
in a remote mountain town in southwestern Colorado. Working and living in a
700-square foot shed covered in license plates, the artist allowed himself to
become vulnerable to the region’s ideas—one might say the ideology
of regionalism. The attendant suspension of criticality—both in the sense
of being critical and of having art-historical knowledge—encouraged
different modes of ‘critical’ to
emerge.
In the twelve Untitled (2001/2010) paintings, Ho allowed himself to
unselfconsciously paint. Their lack of pursuit of originality or polemic
paradoxically underscores their authenticity. A third term between and beside
avant-garde and rear-guard, regional painting’s flank position allows for
it to accidentally comment on the mainstream. Regional art proposes alternatives
not by willful acts of judgment, but by alliteration of and variation on art
that is proximate but not entirely accessible. Under its rubric, an
artist’s relationship to his contemporaries and forbears is communal
rather than competitive. That Ho felt comfortable enough to revisit painting
after a ten-year hiatus is a result of regionalism’s nurture rather than a
reconnection with
nature.
By replacing derivation—borne of lack of imagination—with
emulation—a generous and generative act—Ho alleviates the
‘anxiety of influence’ and thus the need for the defensive maneuvers
of conventional critique, including negation, subversion, irony, and even
parafiction. This allows for other strong subjectivities in the creative
process—an amplification of Ho’s longtime commitment to
collaboration. Such is the case with Hirsch E.P.
Rothko by Hirsch E.P. Rothko (2010), a 90-page
memoir of Ho/Rothko’s Colorado sojourn ghostwritten by Inez Kruckev, who
had creative latitude; Ho’s only contribution was a polemic about
regionalism embedded in the
narrative.
In Hirsch E.P. Rothko’s own words, from the
memoir: “Regionalism is not a style, but a mode of and model for making.
It not so much aims to suspend the viewer’s disbelief as it enables an
artist to suspend his self-consciousness. The suspension of criticality, whether
reflexive or deconstructive, opens a fictive space where a conceptual artist can
be a painter, a painter a writer, a dealer a
publisher….”
Christopher K. Ho (b. 1974, Hong Kong) has had solo exhibitions at
Winkleman Gallery (2008) and GALERIA EDS in Mexico
City. He was included in the 2009 Incheon Biennial, the 2008 Busan Biennale, and
the 2008 Chinese Biennial. He has participated in group exhibitions at the
Queens Museum, Socrates Sculpture Park, Dallas Contemporary, MASSMoCA at the Berkshire Botanical Gardens and the Delaware
Center for Contemporary Art; and internationally at the Freies Museum in Berlin,
the Museum of Contemporary Art in Srpska, and the Other Gallery in Shanghai. He
received his B.F.A. and B.S.
from Cornell University and his M.Phil from
Columbia
University.
