Aleks Danko is a multidisciplinary artist with a career in film, performance, painting, sculpture, installation, sound and works on paper which spans more than three decades. He deploys wit, irony, parody and satire to explore Australian cultural beliefs and aspects of art making and appreciation. Born to Ukrainian parents, Danko has a particular sensitivity to the immigrant condition in Australia as well as a long-held interest in the ironic possibilities and inherent duplicity of language. HO HO Chinese Scroll 1999 directly addresses the latent, and occasionally overt, fear of migration in Australian society. Its lines of text alternate between Father Christmas’s jolly ‘HO HO’ and the ‘OH OH’ of xenophobic alarm. Pivoting on the connotations of the colour red, here representing both Christmas and Communism, the work speaks simultaneously of 1950s naive wholesomeness and paranoia.