Joyce Ho
APT9
Born 1983 Taipei, Taiwan
Lives and works in Taipei, Taiwan
Joyce Ho’s works are unified by their striking aesthetic, which strips back unnecessary elements to foreground uncanny takes on gender roles, bureaucratic control and cultural conventions. This sets up strange spaces of encounter in which her audience has become increasingly central. Her paintings, installations, videos and performance works are notable for their saturated planes of colour — cool yellows and sickly greens — which typically surround neatly groomed young women. The women act as both avatars for the artist herself and enigmatic agents guiding audiences through nonsensical but compelling rituals. Ho’s interest in the tension between dream and reality, and between darkness and light, creates unusual atmospheres and strange situations that are at once uneasy, seductive and playfully humorous.
Joyce Ho has also worked with the QAGOMA Children's Art Centre to develop a project for APT9 Kids.
Joyce Ho / Taiwan b.1983 / Overexposed Memory 2015 / Single-channel video installation, 4‘47” / © Joyce Ho / Image courtesy: The artist and TKG+, Taipei
Joyce Ho’s works explore moments of tension between dreams and reality, darkness and light, resulting in atmospheres that are uneasy, yet seductive. Her presentation in APT9 features new and recent examples of painting, sculpture, video and participatory installation.
Ho’s productions bear the hallmarks of her migration from Taiwan to the United States as a teenager, and her return to Taiwan as an adult, experiences she found both liberating and dislocating. Strongly influenced by avant-garde theatre, Ho has created set designs and directed productions. Accordingly, she has a fascination with the theatrical device of the prelude – an opening scene that produces a sense of anticipation – and a desire to extend that suspense infinitely.
In Ho’s work, there is always another layer to the everyday, and always other ways of seeing the familiar. Her striking, minimal aesthetic, combined with her uncanny takes on gender roles, repetitive movement and bureaucratic efficiency set up strange encounters for her audiences.
