Michael Rikio Ming Hee Ho will participate in 'Matsumoto Architecture+Art Festival 2026 ADVANCE'

Michael Rikio Ming Hee Ho will participate in ‘Matsumoto Architecture+Art Festival 2026 ADVANCE’, taking place in Matsumoto, Nagano, from November 3 to December 13, 2026, presenting works at Shitamachi Kaikan.

Launched in 2022, the Matsumoto Architecture+Art Festival presents contemporary art in historic buildings across the city of Matsumoto. By setting artworks against and within these buildings, the festival seeks to draw renewed attention to the value of the nameless architecture of everyday life and to encourage its continued use. This edition, co-organized with the Culture City of East Asia 2026 Matsumoto Executive Committee, brings together 18 artists across 18 buildings in the city.

Ho’s venue, Shitamachi Kaikan, is a three-storey wooden kanban-style building constructed in 1928 as a pharmacy. Following restoration, it reopened in 1995 as a hub for community development, and its original façade still stands on Agetsuchi Street. Here Ho will present five works created for his 2023 solo exhibition ‘SOMETHING SO BEAUTIFUL IS SO EASILY FORGIVEN’ at KOTARO NUKAGA: YOU MAY FEEL ALONE, TIME TO SHINE, I DON’T WANT TO GO, EMOTIONALLY UNAVAILABLE and A SUNSET WORTH STARING AT. For each work, Ho wrote text directly onto the gallery walls, cut sections from them and mounted these onto wooden panels, also painting further phrases onto the internal structure exposed by the cuts. When the exhibition ended, the walls were repaired and those interior phrases disappeared back into the architecture, while the removed sections of wall remained as independent works.

Ho treats the wall not as a neutral background but as part of the language that constitutes the work, and the scratches, cut edges and seams retain the memory of the place where the language once existed. When the works are shown again within a new architectural setting, Ho says, a fragment of one building enters another; what was once background becomes an object, and what appeared permanent reveals its temporary nature.

Born in 1996 in Kamuela, Hawaiʻi, Michael Rikio Ming Hee Ho is a Japanese and Cantonese American conceptual text-based artist based in Tokyo. He studied art at UCLA. Working primarily with language, Ho combines short poetic phrases with illusion and shaped canvases, challenging the boundaries between reading and seeing. Informed by semiotics and sociolinguistics, his practice explores cultural belonging, diaspora, memory, contemporary anxieties and self-perception through humor and intimacy.

【EXHIBITION DETAILS】
Title: Matsumoto Architecture+Art Festival 2026 ADVANCE
Venue: Shitamachi Kaikan（4-8-11 Ote, Matsumoto, Nagano）
Period: November 3 – December 13, 2026
Hours: 10:00 – 17:00
Closed: Open daily during the festival
Admission: Festival pass required（General 3,000 yen／High school, university and vocational school students 2,000 yen／Junior high school students and younger free, accompanied by a guardian／Free for holders of a disability certificate and one caregiver）
*Passes are available at the Information Center（7-39 Marunouchi, Matsumoto, next to Kappo Matsumoto-kan）or as e-tickets, and are not sold at the exhibition venues.
Organizer: Matsumoto Architecture+Art Festival Executive Committee
Co-organizer: Culture City of East Asia 2026 Matsumoto Executive Committee
HP: https://maaf.jp/artist/michael-rikio-ming-hee-ho