SOMETHING SO BEAUTIFUL IS SO EASILY FORGIVEN
Michael Rikio Ming Hee Ho
April 8 (Sat), - June 3 (Sat), 2023
KOTARO NUKAGA（天王洲）
From April 8 (Sat) to June 3 (Sat), 2023, KOTARO NUKAGA, Tennoz is pleased to present ‘SOMETHING SO BEAUTIFUL IS SO EASILY FORGIVEN’, a solo exhibition by Hawai’i-born American artist Michael Rikio Ming Hee Ho.
Upon entering the current exhibition, viewers will be confronted with an unexpected sight: sections of the gallery walls have been cut out, removed, and turned into artworks. The show, comprised of 10 such wall works, functions as a disruption of the “white cube” itself. Though the gallery walls will be restored after the exhibition, the paintings that have been created directly onto the plywood underneath the removed sections of drywall will continue to live on, hidden but permanent. These works, which cannot be physically taken out of the gallery, will be turned into NFTs.
Michael Rikio Ming Hee Ho was born in Hawai’i in 1996 and graduated summa cum laude with a BA in fine arts from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2018, soon after which he moved his base to Tokyo. Influenced by artists who work with language, such as his mentor at UCLA, Barbara Kruger (1945-); Jenny Holzer (1950-), an artist of the same generation as Kruger; and Laurence Weiner (1942-2021), Ho similarly places language at the core of his practice.
Ho states that the responsibility of the contemporary artist is to react to what is happening in the world today. The wall works in this show consist of two types of paintings; one is the removed section of drywall onto which the artist has drawn a phrase, and the other is the interior structure underneath the removed drywall onto which the artist has drawn another complimentary phrase. The English phrases are based on text extracted from various media, and are largely influenced by the dark, absurd humor of meme culture on the Internet and social media.
By using the language of his generation to deterritorialize the language of the previous generation, Ho’s works create a path of escape that allows for creative possibilities to expand unhindered, like rhizomes.
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EXHIBITION DETAILS ‘SOMETHING SO BEAUTIFUL IS SO EASILY FORGIVEN’ April 8 (Sat), - June 3 (Sat), 2023 11:00 - 18:00 (Tue - Sat) *Closed on Sun, Mon and Public Holiday
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