Fairs
Independent
2024
Michael Ho
A Semblance of Truth
Booth 513
Dates_ May 9–12, 2024
Venue_ Spring Studios, 50 Varick Street, New York, NY 10013
2024
Michael Ho
A Semblance of Truth
Booth 513
Dates_ May 9–12, 2024
Venue_ Spring Studios, 50 Varick Street, New York, NY 10013
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Gallery Vacancy is pleased to present Michael Ho’s solo project A Semblance of Truth at Independent Art Fair, New York 2024. Through a series of paintings, the presentation explores the complexity of identity performance, specifically within the historical phenomenon of yellow face. A Semblance of Truth engages with the enigmatic Chinese figure Chung Ling Soo from the early 20th century, a stage persona appropriated from the Chinese magician Ching Ling Foo by a white magician William Ellsworth Robinson from the US. Dressed and behaved like a stereotypical Chinese, Robinson garnered international fame by manipulating the exotic enchantment of Orientalism. By unfolding and demystifying the character of Chung and his trickery, Ho interweaves historical elements, personal experiences, and magical symbolism to open the discussion around the perception of East-Asian representation in the West, whilst revealing the unceasing fluctuation of one’s identity between belonging and otherness.
A Semblance of Truth begins with a set of paintings, Where Wounded Dreams Are Made to Blossom (2024), to reiterate the most dramatic moment which both exposed Chung’s deceptive disguise and ended Robinson’s life on stage. During his famous performance “Condemned to Death by the Boxers—Defying Their Bullets,” in which he was supposed to catch a bullet with a ceramic plate, Chung was shot due to a prop malfunction. In his final moment, Robinson cried for help in his native English, revealing his true identity as a fraudulent white man on stage. In Ho’s interpretation, this theatrical moment is situated in a mythical landscape, with a pond of overshadowing water dominating the composition, where magic and race instantaneously failed. The water obscures the identity and the action of the figures, containing a state of ambivalence where truth and illusion collide. The multi-panel configuration references Edouard Manet’s damaged painting The Execution of Maximilian (1867-8), whose subject matter and anti-colonial historical backstory bear a prophetic resemblance to the accident. The marching soldiers, acting or executing, being both real and fictional, nevertheless dissolve into the rippling water that encompasses the contradictory plausibility of transcendent truth. In Total Eclipse (2024), the work guides viewers through a state of magic by portraying a figure performing a fire trick and simultaneously reveals Ho’s recent experiment in which the central figure is composed from the backside of the canvas. As the bare hands tame the flame, the background texture gradually erodes the foreground coloration of the figure, undermining yet underlining the effect of illusionistic wonder. Further, the artist delves into the ornaments and accessories employed by Robinson to legitimize his Chinese identity, elucidating the material objects’ symbolic significance in identity performance. During Robinson’s international tours, artifacts such as ceramic plates and costumes were constantly put on display, reinforcing the spectacle effect of his showmanship through authentic objects. In Re-Enchantment (2024), the artist accentuates the visual connection between the magician and the chinoiserie object, both covertly revealed under a curtain of sumptuous foliage. The veil of smoke which superimposes on the screening plants forges a duality: the vaguely defined Chinese aesthetics is solidifying the magician’s exotic identity while evolving into a perceived authenticity. This delicate transition is further captured in Migration Towards West (2024) through the allegorical image of the queue wig. In this work, the amorphous queue slithers through a pile of shattered porcelain plates, embodying the fluxus in identity performance and cultural assimilation. The carefully constructed and performed identities of the conjuror, both being Robinson and Chung, become inseparable and gradually enter into a state of in-betweenness that resonates with Ho’s diasporic experience. Through Ho’s painterly rendering, the historic and cultural context of the objects are stripped and reinterpreted, alluding to the fundamental mechanism of identity projection onto specific material objects. As a result, the deep-rooted otherness, mimicry, and appropriation are accentuated within the poetic retelling of the story. A Semblance of Truth serves as an extension of Ho’s investigation into the mysterious characters and personas throughout Western popular culture, addressing the inherent problematics of racial impersonation. In this presentation, the decontextualized images are suspended in a fictional space of liminality, re-examining the mythical prospects of history which is inundated with ambiguity and ambivalence. |
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