Michael Ho

Born in Arnhem, Netherlands in 1991 and raised in Germany, London-based artist Michael Ho works across painting, film and installation in a practice he describes as a world-building exercise. Ho grew up beside a forest in a small German town, where he found refuge from having to conform between his German roots and his Chinese heritage. The landscape of the forest offered somewhere to exist where these differences didn’t need to be resolved, creating a third space of belonging balanced out on the edge.

Ho’s paintings give this third space a material form that begins on the reverse of unprimed canvas, where he pushes paint through the fabric before re-stretching it and adding more on top of it from the other side. Developed from an accident while Ho was teaching himself to paint during the pandemic, the technique produces grounds in which figures and objects emerge from their surrounding landscapes. These compositions are assembled from photographs, archival images and memory, suffused with hues of blue, red and purple that evoke the fluctuating light of twilight. This light extends the sense of an in-between into the atmosphere of the paintings, leaving their narratives suspended between reality and fiction.

Most of Ho’s figures are positioned frozen in the act of searching, something the artist has shared is very present in his work. Belonging in the end, is the resolution that comes at the end of the search, one his work examines without having to propose a singular solution. Across Ho’s practice, objects move between evidence and the mythological realm. In his visit to a jade-cutting factory, he was drawn to the smoky water carrying the residue of carving, recognising in it a resemblance to historical elixirs consumed in the belief that jade could prolong life. This water is approached as a form of modern myth production, in which an industrial process reproduces the physical likeness of an older promise. Ho continues to explore this in his upcoming documentary on cordyceps harvesting, which asks what happens when something gathered with spiritual reverence can be reproduced artificially and at scale. Following Tibetan nomads whose relationships with their surroundings are guided by spiritual belief, the film examines a shift in the relationship between tradition and industrial production, approaching climate change as a spiritual crisis.

This circulation of belief also informs Ho’s film, Echoes from the Void (2022), made in response to conspiracy theories and anti-Asian sentiment during the pandemic. Ho shouts conspiracy theories into a void, allowing the echoes to accumulate and the words to lose their definition, drawing on the distortion of information through repetition. Each shouted theory produces a pearl that nestles into the landscape, depositing its trace as his voice accumulates in echoes. The pearls are representative of the myth that the moon gives birth to them, bringing an older belief into contact with the contemporary circulation of repetitive misinformation.

Ho graduated from the Architectural Association, London, in 2019. Solo exhibitions include As Feelings Burn Their Way at High Art, Paris, and Grotto Heavens at Gallery Vacancy, Shanghai (both 2023), and Kūnlún at V.O Curations, London (2021). Selected group exhibitions include Chase a Crooked Shadow: Film Noir as Contemporary Mirror at The Warehouse, Dallas (2026), a door left ajar at kurimanzutto, New York (2025), and New Moroism at White Cube, Hong Kong (2023). His work is held in collections including the Asymmetry Art Foundation, K11 Foundation and X Museum.