HO SIU-KEE'S solo show at Grotto Fine Art is as beautiful as it is intellectually hard-hitting. His latest works, mostly created this year, include gleaming bronze sculptures with fine detailing, striking digitally altered black and white photos, and works in other media.
Ho is best known for using images of body parts (usually his own) to explore his favourite subject - the workings of the human body.
'This year, I've been studying the human senses, human perception and the body's different possibilities,' he says. 'I'm interested in the body's signals, the experience of perception. How does the body see? How does it smell? How does it react to its environment? How does it feel pain?'
The 39-year-old's work has been featured at both the Venice and Sao Paulo Art biennials, and in exhibitions from Bangkok and Berlin to London and New York. Still, like most Hong Kong artists, the internationally acclaimed Ho can't rely on his artwork to make a living. 'It's really hard here,' he says. His goal is to have one solo exhibition a year. Ho works four days a week as a teacher at the Hong Kong Arts Centre, which enables him to keep a studio in an old factory building in Cheung Sha Wan.
Born and raised in Hong Kong, Ho first studied art at the Chinese University, although his preoccupation with the human body didn't develop until he attended the Cranbrook Academy of Art, in Michigan, in the early 1990s. He continued this theme when he received his doctorate in fine arts from RMIT University in Melbourne.
Ho's academic background is reflected in the bilingual text of his book The Perceptual Body, which is available at Grotto. Ho quotes French writer-philosophers such as Lacan, Descartes and Sartre, and mixes it up with Plato, Buddhist tracts and scientific and pseudo-scientific writing.
