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Michael Ho’s series of paintings A Semblance of Truth, presented at Independent in May 2024 by Gallery Vacancy, Shanghai, is like a window into an inverted world or a film negative: recognizable but also recognizably amiss. Each work in the series is rendered with blurred, snowy contours, achieved through a technique the artist developed with his late collaborator Chiyan Ho that they called reverse painting. This is one of the first solo projects Ho has accomplished after vowing to continue their collaborative practice, perhaps not by coincidence suffused in haunted memory and grief. 

The process of reverse painting evolved from an initial mistake, when the artists discovered that painting on unprimed canvas would yield a less pigmented image on the back. Seen at close hand, the surfaces of Ho’s canvases are riddled with bumps in places where he has applied pressure to push the paint through, working from the back to the front. The resulting images achieve a diluted color palette more reminiscent of Eastern ink painting than the Western oil and acrylic being used.

Michael Ho: Conjuring Acts - Features - Independent Art Fair

Michael Ho, Migration Towards West, 2024, oil and acrylic on canvas, 220 × 125 cm, Courtesy of the Artist and Gallery Vacancy, Shanghai. 

Ho gives a critical edge to this classic theme of East meets West, often interpreted as simple cultural exchange in art history. As the cultural theorist Stuart Hall wrote, hybridity resulting from Western conquest “insists on marking the disjunctures of power and position that have to be contested.” In A Semblance of Truth, Ho’s provocative central subject is William Ellsworth Robinson, a white American magician who disturbingly adopted a Chinese persona named Chung Ling Soo in the early 1900s. Yet what appears to be a closed case of yellowface is opened by the artist with effective mystique.

In a vertical painting Migration Towards West, Ho depicts a queue, a long braid that Chinese men wore during the Qing dynasty (1644-1911), snaking through grass. Its length is exaggerated and almost threateningly animalistic, as if shaped by racial animus towards exotic “Oriental” style. Lying in the same thicket are the broken shards of a plate that allude to how Robinson met his demise. While performing a notorious magic trick in which he was supposed to catch a bullet in a porcelain dish, the gun fired a real bullet into his lung. 

The fact that his racist act ultimately killed him probably allows us to look past the insult of Robinson’s misdeeds into its absurdities. The magician shattered his own illusion by crying out in perfect English after being shot, not Chinese or broken English, as he usually pretended to speak on stage. Language unmasked Robinson as not the “marvelous Chinese conjurer” that he claimed to be on posters, but a white man born in Westchester County, New York.

Ho’s work confirms the thesis made by the artist Amalia Ulman, that the performance of authenticity becomes apparent when it is inconsistent. And also like Ulman, Ho doesn’t so much as hope to advocate for more truthful representation but instead exposes the technologies by which a semblance of truth is constructed. In early 1900s America, there was no Photoshop, FaceTune, or AI, but wigs, costume, stage makeup, and sleight of hand. Ho reserves the greatest realism for the accessories to Robinson’s crime, which he paints in a layer added on top of the gauzy reverse-painted foliage that fills the background of Migration Towards West. The porcelain is crisp with detail, down to its blue-and-white lotus pattern.

Michael Ho: Conjuring Acts - Features - Independent Art Fair

Michael Ho, Migration Towards West (detail), 2024, oil and acrylic on canvas, 220 × 125 cm, Courtesy of the Artist and Gallery Vacancy, Shanghai. 

At Independent, this painting was displayed adjacent to Total Eclipse, depicting the magician with his face obscured by a plume of smoke, a recurring element in many of Robinson’s original posters. When asked what he used as his model, Ho replied, “myself.” It struck me that rather than making a one-directional critique of yellowface, he had implicated himself in the act. This begs the question, why would yellowface offer an opportunity for partial self-portraiture? 

An answer might be found in the artist’s own troubles with fixing an identity. Born to Chinese parents in the Netherlands and then raised in Germany, Ho recalls never feeling at home. “I always found myself in between cultures,” he says. “So in Germany, of course, I never felt truly German. But then also because I grew up in Germany, when I’m in China, I don’t feel Chinese.” Even the setting of the paintings reflects such feelings. “I wanted to set the paintings in twilight as quite literally an in-between time.”

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Michael Ho, Total Eclipse, 2024, oil and acrylic on canvas, 180 × 220 cm, Courtesy of the Artist and Gallery Vacancy, Shanghai. 

Michael Ho, Total Eclipse, 2024, oil and acrylic on canvas, 180 × 220 cm, Courtesy of the Artist and Gallery Vacancy, Shanghai. 

Michael Ho, Total Eclipse (detail), 2024, oil and acrylic on canvas, 180 × 220 cm, Courtesy of the Artist and Gallery Vacancy, Shanghai. 

Michael Ho, Total Eclipse (detail), 2024, oil and acrylic on canvas, 180 × 220 cm, Courtesy of the Artist and Gallery Vacancy, Shanghai. 

Michael Ho, Total Eclipse (detail), 2024, oil and acrylic on canvas, 180 × 220 cm, Courtesy of the Artist and Gallery Vacancy, Shanghai. 

Michael Ho, Total Eclipse (detail), 2024, oil and acrylic on canvas, 180 × 220 cm, Courtesy of the Artist and Gallery Vacancy, Shanghai. 

Michael Ho, Total Eclipse (detail), 2024, oil and acrylic on canvas, 180 × 220 cm, Courtesy of the Artist and Gallery Vacancy, Shanghai. 

Michael Ho, Total Eclipse (detail), 2024, oil and acrylic on canvas, 180 × 220 cm, Courtesy of the Artist and Gallery Vacancy, Shanghai. 

Michael Ho, Total Eclipse (detail), 2024, oil and acrylic on canvas, 180 × 220 cm, Courtesy of the Artist and Gallery Vacancy, Shanghai. 

Michael Ho, Total Eclipse (detail), 2024, oil and acrylic on canvas, 180 × 220 cm, Courtesy of the Artist and Gallery Vacancy, Shanghai. 

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Michael Ho: Conjuring Acts - Features - Independent Art Fair

Michael Ho, Stream of Prophecies, 2024, oil and acrylic on canvas, 20 × 30 cm, Courtesy of the Artist and Gallery Vacancy, Shanghai.

Ho’s cosmopolitan upbringing has given him a quiet ambivalence towards notions of authenticity. He hesitates to reify myths about identity that deserve more flexibility. An example can be taken of Stream of Prophecies, a small painting of ornate Chinese fingernail guards submerged in violet liquid. Ho explains they refer to ornaments worn by Fu Manchu, a highly racialized villain character created by an English author at the height of the Yellow Peril. Even this superficial detail was “misused,” because it was usually upper-class women who wore nail guards in imperial China, but Ho sees in it “a nod to [Fu Manchu’s] queerness.” 

Recently, Ho has found inspiration in the essay “Taking Up Residence in Homelessness” by the philosopher Vilém Flusser, whose criticality of the violence that often erupts from desiring home—patriotism and Zionism, for instance—caused him to relinquish longing for a homeland at all. This theory spoke to Ho’s feeling of statelessness. “I don’t mind not being attached to a specific nation, but then I think maybe it is also good to rethink these ideas of [nationalism].” 

Neither fully Dutch, as his documents identify him, nor German despite his fluency in German, nor British as a resident in London, nor solely Chinese, Ho takes a personal interest in what it means to assimilate or “pass” as someone else, in hiding parts of yourself for survival’s sake and in trying on new identities for size. This personal journey led to a curiosity about a white showman who found a home in Asian flesh, an illusion that consumed his life and for which he died.

Michael Ho: Conjuring Acts - Features - Independent Art Fair

Michael Ho, Where Wounded Dreams Are Made to Blossom, 2024, Oil and acrylic on canvas, A set of 4 works, overall: 220 × 565 cm (86 5/8 × 222 1/2 in), Courtesy of the Artist and Gallery Vacancy, Shanghai. 

Michael Ho: Conjuring Acts - Features - Independent Art Fair

An advertisement for Chung Ling Soo’s bullet-catching trick (c.1900s)

Whereas Migration Towards West addresses the aftermath of Robinson’s failed bullet catch trick, a multi-panel painting titled Where Wounded Dreams Are Made to Blossom examines its antecedent. Ho saw compositional similarities between one of the magician’s promotional posters and Édouard Manet’s damaged painting, The Execution of Maximilian (1867-69). Each depicts a firing squad preparing to take aim against their man. By collapsing these disparate historical incidents together, Ho raises new questions about their interpretation and meanings. Could the deaths of Maximilian, a European emperor installed in Mexico, and of Chung Ling Soo both symbolize Indigenous victory against foreign conquest? 

Gazing into the murky water at the center of Ho’s painting, which ripples with putrid greens and luminous purples, you won’t find closure to these questions. In this liminal dimension, what is dead threatens to come back to life. Ho often situates his scenes at dusk or under moonlight because it evacuates color, he says, transforming human skin into a corpse-like pallor, so what is living could be mistaken for dead. While Robinson’s racial masquerade ended with his accidental death, his biggest trick exposed for all to see, the objects that allowed him to posture threaten to be assembled again.

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Danielle Wu is a writer and curator based in Brooklyn, New York. Her reviews have been published in Art in America, Artforum, Frieze, and The Offing, among other publications. Notable curatorial projects include Just Between Us: From the Archives of Arlan Huang at Pearl River Mart, New York (2023); Water Works at International Studio & Curatorial Program, New York (2022); and Ghost in the Ghost at Tiger Strikes Asteroid, New York (2019).