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.

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.