Ho Kan integrates Eastern calligraphy and the art of seal carving with a minimalist yet poetic visual language to develop his distinctive, Eastern lyrical abstraction. He starts with elemental points, and, from them, he creates his own philosophy about the arrangement of the image, validating the existence of each element.
His work, with its refinement, sense of intellectual play and universal appeal, is strikingly alive and historically significant.
TEXT/John Seed
Great Genius ripens late
Great Music few notes
Great Painting without picture
--Lao-Tze (translation by Zao Wou-Ki)
In the mid-twentieth century, when Abstract Expressionism was transforming the field of Modern Art, Chinese artists were largely isolated from modernist developments. Divided into two camps by revolution and civil war, they found themselves facing severely limited possibilities. Chinese Artists on the Communist controlled mainland were obligated to mimic Soviet propaganda art and manufacture Maoist kitsch. Their counterparts in Nationalist Taiwan could choose between learning academic European techniques or maintaining the moribund traditions of guó huà (traditionalist) ink painting. The tone of Taiwan’s artistic culture was modeled by the President’s wife, Madame Chiang Kai-shek, who studied ink painting with Huang Chun-pi, a specialist in waterfall painting who was also the Dean of Art at the Taiwan Provincial Normal School.
Ho Kan, who had fled the mainland in 1949 for Taiwan, entered the TPNS in 1950 to train as an art teacher. Almost immediately he felt limited by its academic curriculum and practices which struck him as rigid and fixed. Ho Kan also found the exercises and assignments easy, which bothered him since he held the personal conviction that painting “should not be an easy job”. Expanding his horizons by visiting art exhibitions, attending lectures and reading magazines that featured modern art, Ho Kan soon met the artist Li Chun-Shan who would become his mentor and expose the young artist to modern art and thought.
Li Chun-Shan, who had entered the Shanghai Academy of Fine Arts in 1930 at the age of 18, had been affiliated with China’s first modern art group, Juelanshe (The Storm Society). During a 1932 trip to Japan he encountered Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita, whose anti-academic teaching methods impressed him greatly. It was in Japan that Li Chun-Shan also discovered Surrealism and Freud’s theories of the unconscious, which transformed his art and generated his lifelong dedication to modernism. Highly influential—both as a critic and a teacher—he established a studio and art school in a brick bungalow on An-dong Street in Taipei’s Eastern District where he propagated avant-garde ideas to avid disciples.
Ho Kan responded well to his new mentor’s “coffee house” style of teaching which emphasized conversation and study. “He taught us that looking at paintings could be divided into three stages,” Ho Kan later recalled; “the first one is to ‘appreciate,’ the second to ‘study,’ and the third, ‘create.’ Li Chun-Shan also opened Ho Kan up to modernist ways of thinking including the potential of seriality in painting and the possibilities of overall composition offered by contemplating the entirety of a developing work. Ho Kan soon found that his studies with Li Chun-Shan had freed him from naturalism and tradition and moved him towards what called he cosmological. He finally felt free to pursue “the essence of painting,” which he detected in the works of European modern masters including Cézanne, Gauguin, and Van Gogh.
After Li Chun-Shan left Taipei in 1955, Ho Kan and seven of his other students—Oyan Wen Yuen, Hsiao Chin, Li Yuan-Chia, Tommy Chen, Wu Hao, Hsia Yang, and Hsiao Ming-Hsien—founded The Eastern Painting Association (To-Fan), the first Chinese art movement dedicated to modernist abstraction. The To-Fan group soon achieved notoriety after their 1957 group exhibition in Taipei outraged the conservative Taiwanese art establishment. From that point forward they were known as The Eight Outlaws. The 1957 show included artists from Spain, where Ho Kan soon travelled. As he gained recognition for his Surrealist-themed images of strange beasts in dreamlike spaces, overseas exhibitions in Japan and Italy broadened Ho Kan’s perspective. In particular, visits to Milan, Italy—the home of a large Chinese community—provided new exposure and opportunities for conversation.
Ho Kan’s friend Hsao Chin had moved to Milan in 1960 where he did what many of China’s diaspora artists eventually did: he attempted to redefine his Chinese roots in a new cultural context. Extensive study of the Tao led Hsao Chin to the idea that there were innate pattern sand essences to be discovered behind the facade of the natural world. By 1961 he had founded an art movement, the Punto International Art Movement, along with Italian artist Antonio Calderara, Japanese Sculptor Kenjiro Azuma, and Chinese artist Li Yuan-jia. One of the first international art movements to blend Eastern and Western ideas, the group’s manifesto urged an understanding of the finite within the infinite using a “point” that could be extended into lines to construct abstract forms. Anti-materialistic and grounded in the values of simplicity and equilibrium, the Punto movement held considerable magnetism for Ho Kan, who
moved to Milan in 1964.
In Italy Ho Kan’s art retained the “peculiar beauty” of Surrealism, while gradually incorporating some of the Taoist ideas and geometric tendencies associated with the Punto group. Living in Milan, where the legacy of “Metaphysical” painters like Carlos Carra and Giorgio de Chirico still resonated, further stimulated Ho Kan’s interest in ideas about identity and consciousness. By the late 1960s an array of idiosyncratic forms, circles and lines populated the colored fields of Ho Kan’s work, which were activated by implied Taoist energies. In contrast with Western abstractions of the same period, which often employed soft-edged or poured expanses of modulated color that carried Expressionist urges, Ho Kan’s paintings displayed a kind of decorous and refined sensibility rooted in Chinese art and philosophy.
Working with a set of elements inspired by the forms of Chinese characters—including space, points, circles and triangles—Ho Kan has spent the past six decades inventing personal ideograms that resist association with fixed meanings or associations. These inventions coalesce into what Ho Kan thinks of as “spiritual arrangements,” set in aesthetically magnetized spaces of deep rich colors. Hints of remembered forms, including Chinese incense burners and furnishings from the artist’s childhood home make appearances from time to time as do Taoist symbols, fragments of architecture and vestigial figures. These glimpses of the real are not pictures in any literal sense, but rather essences that move from memory towards intangibility.
In his paintings of the past decade, Ho Kan has developed a distinctive visual language that features symbols which playfully evade fixed associations or meanings. Origin 24 from 2010features an enclosed blue spiral that has a Yin and Yang at its origin, while also suggesting rings of smoke filling a sphere. It seems to say something about the way that energies are contained and balanced. Abstract 2015-154, another composition which places a circular boundary within the square of the canvas, contains a small frame with opposing magenta and white corners radiating yellow triangles. Is it, perhaps, a kind of spiritual map of the way that art makes its way from the soul into the world? An oval “point” of black floats at the center of Abstract 2015-059, held in a red stasis by opposing stripes of white. It is a symmetrical image that balances like meditative vision. Perhaps coincidentally—or intuitively—the composition’s center is dominated by the red, white and blue colors of Taiwan’s flag.
In his continued pursuit of the “essence of painting” that began in Taiwan, Ho Kan remains committed both to finding the natural expression of his own subconscious and acknowledging the energy and chaos of the universe. “We are not concerned with the universe of the scientists,” Ho Kan says of himself and other artists. “Artist’s universes are created out of the imagination.”
Today Ho Kan stands as a pioneering modernist and a key figure among China’s artistic diaspora. Over time, his work has remained true to the artistic vision that was formed during his studies with Li Chun-Shan. It has also broadened through his associations with the Punto movement and exposure to an international range of influences. Like Zao Wou-ki, another Chinese born artist who worked for most of his life in Paris, Ho Kan needed to leave China to find his inner essence and its deep cultural connections. His work, with its refinement, sense of intellectual play and universal appeal, is strikingly alive and historically significant.
Ho Kan: Forms of Consciousness
Great Genius ripens late
Great Music few notes
Great Painting without picture
--Lao-Tze (translation by Zao Wou-Ki)
In the mid-twentieth century, when Abstract Expressionism was transforming the field of Modern Art, Chinese artists were largely isolated from modernist developments. Divided into two camps by revolution and civil war, they found themselves facing severely limited possibilities. Chinese Artists on the Communist controlled mainland were obligated to mimic Soviet propaganda art and manufacture Maoist kitsch. Their counterparts in Nationalist Taiwan could choose between learning academic European techniques or maintaining the moribund traditions of guó huà (traditionalist) ink painting. The tone of Taiwan’s artistic culture was modeled by the President’s wife, Madame Chiang Kai-shek, who studied ink painting with Huang Chun-pi, a specialist in waterfall painting who was also the Dean of Art at the Taiwan Provincial Normal School.
Ho Kan, who had fled the mainland in 1949 for Taiwan, entered the TPNS in 1950 to train as an art teacher. Almost immediately he felt limited by its academic curriculum and practices which struck him as rigid and fixed. Ho Kan also found the exercises and assignments easy, which bothered him since he held the personal conviction that painting “should not be an easy job”. Expanding his horizons by visiting art exhibitions, attending lectures and reading magazines that featured modern art, Ho Kan soon met the artist Li Chun-Shan who would become his mentor and expose the young artist to modern art and thought.
Li Chun-Shan, who had entered the Shanghai Academy of Fine Arts in 1930 at the age of 18, had been affiliated with China’s first modern art group, Juelanshe (The Storm Society). During a 1932 trip to Japan he encountered Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita, whose anti-academic teaching methods impressed him greatly. It was in Japan that Li Chun-Shan also discovered Surrealism and Freud’s theories of the unconscious, which transformed his art and generated his lifelong dedication to modernism. Highly influential—both as a critic and a teacher—he established a studio and art school in a brick bungalow on An-dong Street in Taipei’s Eastern District where he propagated avant-garde ideas to avid disciples.
Ho Kan responded well to his new mentor’s “coffee house” style of teaching which emphasized conversation and study. “He taught us that looking at paintings could be divided into three stages,” Ho Kan later recalled; “the first one is to ‘appreciate,’ the second to ‘study,’ and the third, ‘create.’ Li Chun-Shan also opened Ho Kan up to modernist ways of thinking including the potential of seriality in painting and the possibilities of overall composition offered by contemplating the entirety of a developing work. Ho Kan soon found that his studies with Li Chun-Shan had freed him from naturalism and tradition and moved him towards what called he cosmological. He finally felt free to pursue “the essence of painting,” which he detected in the works of European modern masters including Cézanne, Gauguin, and Van Gogh.
After Li Chun-Shan left Taipei in 1955, Ho Kan and seven of his other students—Oyan Wen Yuen, Hsiao Chin, Li Yuan-Chia, Tommy Chen, Wu Hao, Hsia Yang, and Hsiao Ming-Hsien—founded The Eastern Painting Association (To-Fan), the first Chinese art movement dedicated to modernist abstraction. The To-Fan group soon achieved notoriety after their 1957 group exhibition in Taipei outraged the conservative Taiwanese art establishment. From that point forward they were known as The Eight Outlaws. The 1957 show included artists from Spain, where Ho Kan soon travelled. As he gained recognition for his Surrealist-themed images of strange beasts in dreamlike spaces, overseas exhibitions in Japan and Italy broadened Ho Kan’s perspective. In particular, visits to Milan, Italy—the home of a large Chinese community—provided new exposure and opportunities for conversation.
Ho Kan’s friend Hsao Chin had moved to Milan in 1960 where he did what many of China’s diaspora artists eventually did: he attempted to redefine his Chinese roots in a new cultural context. Extensive study of the Tao led Hsao Chin to the idea that there were innate pattern sand essences to be discovered behind the facade of the natural world. By 1961 he had founded an art movement, the Punto International Art Movement, along with Italian artist Antonio Calderara, Japanese Sculptor Kenjiro Azuma, and Chinese artist Li Yuan-jia. One of the first international art movements to blend Eastern and Western ideas, the group’s manifesto urged an understanding of the finite within the infinite using a “point” that could be extended into lines to construct abstract forms. Anti-materialistic and grounded in the values of simplicity and equilibrium, the Punto movement held considerable magnetism for Ho Kan, who
moved to Milan in 1964.
In Italy Ho Kan’s art retained the “peculiar beauty” of Surrealism, while gradually incorporating some of the Taoist ideas and geometric tendencies associated with the Punto group. Living in Milan, where the legacy of “Metaphysical” painters like Carlos Carra and Giorgio de Chirico still resonated, further stimulated Ho Kan’s interest in ideas about identity and consciousness. By the late 1960s an array of idiosyncratic forms, circles and lines populated the colored fields of Ho Kan’s work, which were activated by implied Taoist energies. In contrast with Western abstractions of the same period, which often employed soft-edged or poured expanses of modulated color that carried Expressionist urges, Ho Kan’s paintings displayed a kind of decorous and refined sensibility rooted in Chinese art and philosophy.
Working with a set of elements inspired by the forms of Chinese characters—including space, points, circles and triangles—Ho Kan has spent the past six decades inventing personal ideograms that resist association with fixed meanings or associations. These inventions coalesce into what Ho Kan thinks of as “spiritual arrangements,” set in aesthetically magnetized spaces of deep rich colors. Hints of remembered forms, including Chinese incense burners and furnishings from the artist’s childhood home make appearances from time to time as do Taoist symbols, fragments of architecture and vestigial figures. These glimpses of the real are not pictures in any literal sense, but rather essences that move from memory towards intangibility.
In his paintings of the past decade, Ho Kan has developed a distinctive visual language that features symbols which playfully evade fixed associations or meanings. Origin 24 from 2010features an enclosed blue spiral that has a Yin and Yang at its origin, while also suggesting rings of smoke filling a sphere. It seems to say something about the way that energies are contained and balanced. Abstract 2015-154, another composition which places a circular boundary within the square of the canvas, contains a small frame with opposing magenta and white corners radiating yellow triangles. Is it, perhaps, a kind of spiritual map of the way that art makes its way from the soul into the world? An oval “point” of black floats at the center of Abstract 2015-059, held in a red stasis by opposing stripes of white. It is a symmetrical image that balances like meditative vision. Perhaps coincidentally—or intuitively—the composition’s center is dominated by the red, white and blue colors of Taiwan’s flag.
In his continued pursuit of the “essence of painting” that began in Taiwan, Ho Kan remains committed both to finding the natural expression of his own subconscious and acknowledging the energy and chaos of the universe. “We are not concerned with the universe of the scientists,” Ho Kan says of himself and other artists. “Artist’s universes are created out of the imagination.”
Today Ho Kan stands as a pioneering modernist and a key figure among China’s artistic diaspora. Over time, his work has remained true to the artistic vision that was formed during his studies with Li Chun-Shan. It has also broadened through his associations with the Punto movement and exposure to an international range of influences. Like Zao Wou-ki, another Chinese born artist who worked for most of his life in Paris, Ho Kan needed to leave China to find his inner essence and its deep cultural connections. His work, with its refinement, sense of intellectual play and universal appeal, is strikingly alive and historically significant.