The Ninth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

71 ARTISTS On the second day, Saturday, your three minutes... 2017 Installation view, Art Basel Hong Kong / Image courtesy: The artist and TKG+, Taipei Born 1983, Taipei, Taiwan Lives and works in Taipei Joyce Ho’s works are unified by their striking, minimal aesthetic, while her uncanny takes on gender roles, repetitive movement and bureaucratic efficiency set up strange encounters for her audiences. Her interest in the tension between dreams and reality, darkness and light, results in atmospheres that are both uneasy and seductive. With their suggestions of disturbing childhood memories, Ho’s paintings are striking with their saturated planes of colour. When transposed to her spatial and performative works, these colours — cool yellows and sickly greens — frame neatly groomed young women, who act as both avatars for the artist and mysterious agents guiding audiences through apparently nonsensical rituals. In contrast, some works are almost completely devoid of hue, assembled within white installation spaces, so that when colours do enter the scenario — such as deep reds or dense blacks — they are amplified and intense. In Overexposed memory 2015, shot against a lemon yellow wall, an actor slowly squeezes and bites into different pieces of fruit; the camera lingers on their surfaces until they collapse into a pulpy mush. To emphasise the effect, Ho subjected the fruit to prolonged boiling, before painting the surfaces in their original colours to create the illusion of ripeness, so that as they break apart, the pigments mingle unnaturally with their juices. Even the sounds of the interactions are deliberately odd, produced not by the manipulation of the fruit itself, but by the rustle of packaging and the unlikely addition of a satisfying ‘ding’ as the actor’s teeth bite into a cherry tomato. In the installation On the other day 2017, the audience becomes part of the scenario. Seated in identical waiting rooms on either side of a semi-transparent window, viewers’ reflections are eerily overlaid onto the bodies of those seated opposite. Other works endearingly break framing conventions, as in the image of a steaming kettle projected over a painting of the Japanese volcanic island of Sakurajima, which itself turns out to mimic a magazine photograph of the same image directly behind it. Paintings on clothbound book covers, meanwhile, playfully incorporate the volumes’ ribbon bookmarks into delicately rendered profiles of young women. Ho’s productions bear the hallmarks of her influences and experiences. She has spoken of migrating from Taiwan to the United States as a teenager and returning as an adult, an itinerary she found both liberating and dislocating. 1 Her early paintings complemented her work in avant-garde theatre, drawing on and even featuring in the set designs of the Taipei-based Riverbed Theatre, of which she was a member. Ho has also described a fascination with the theatrical device of the prelude, an opening scene that produces a sense of anticipation, and of a desire to extend suspense infinitely in her work. 2 Indeed, as purposeful as her staged encounters may seem, with their impeccably attired guides and their resemblance to ritual and official process, productive outcomes are not immediately apparent. Joyce Ho’s creations, however, are far from meaningless. They are designed to render established frameworks redundant by bringing into play what lies beyond them. In Ho’s work, there is always another layer to the everyday, always another way of seeing the familiar. Like a dream world hovering just out of view, Ho’s works hum with unexpected connections, perspectives and possibilities. Reuben Keehan Endnotes 1 ‘Discovery series: An interview with Joyce Ho’, Company , 29 June 2011, <http://www.welcometocompany.com/discovery-series-interview-joyce-ho >, viewed July 2018. 2 Joyce Ho, artist statement, in Prelude [exhibition catalogue], IT Park, Taipei, 2014, p.3. JOYCE HO