Christopher K. Ho

Artist Christopher K. Ho was born in Hong Kong in 1974. He moved to Kuala Lumpur in 1976, then to the United States in 1978. He grew up in Los Angeles, California, and spent his high school years at the Hotchkiss boarding school in Connecticut. Ho studied architecture at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, earning two Bachelor’s degrees from the school: a BFA in architecture (1996) and a BS in History of Architecture and Urbanism (1997). He went on to earn a Master’s of Philosophy degree in art history from New York City’s Columbia University in 2003.

Ho established his art studio in Manhattan in 2001, and worked there until 2009. Between 2009 and 2010, he moved his studio to a remote mountain town in Colorado for a project investigating regional American art. He returned to New York the following year, establishing a new studio in Brooklyn’s waterfront DUMBO neighborhood in 2011. In addition to his own artistic work, since 2000, Ho has worked as a critic at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in Providence, Rhode Island. In 2010, he also served as a Critical Studies Fellow at the Cranbrook Art Academy in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.

Ho is known for an eclectic practice that encompasses conceptual painting, sculpture, photography, and writing. He employs these diverse formats to explore what he describes as the “often invisible social forces implicating contemporary art,” referencing not only other artists but also sociological, economical, and historical threads. Ho’s 2013 solo show and series Demoiselles d’Avignon, for example, at Y Gallery in New York, was inspired in part by Picasso’s own series of the same name, and “refracted Western abstraction through the eyes of a future class of refined Chinese princelings.” 2013’s Privileged White People, meanwhile, focused on the sensibility of artists who grew up during the affluence of the Clinton presidency. And 2008’s Happy Birthday, hosted by New York’s Winkleman Gallery (and Ho’s first solo show), included a life-sized nude replica of gallerist Ed Winkleman in an otherwise empty, grey-painted space.

The artist’s work was included in the Incheon Biennial (2009); the Chinese Biennial in Beijing (2008); the Busan Bienniale (2008); as well as in group shows at Storm King Art Center (2013) and the Cranbrook Art Museum (2011).