Curator:
Sabine Vazieux

Venue:
Villa Reale di Monza, Italy

Opening:
2018.06.09  11:00 am

In 1964, Ho Kan, a pioneering artist in Taiwan’s Tongfang Art Group, came to Milan, where he would spend the next five decades of his life. In this country, which had represented the peak of European painting for nearly six centuries, Ho absorbed the characteristics of traditional Italian painting and was influenced by the artistic environment of the time. During his time in Italy, he became aquainted with Luccio Fontana, Roberdo Crippa, Wifredo Lam, Mario Nigro, etc., and his style also slowly became bright and open. Bringing the use of colors to its full play and demonstrating his pursuit of forms, the artist combined his colors and forms with the charm of calligraphy and seal carving, establishing his own unique painting style that he has continued until the present day. Unlike the cold abstraction commonly seen, Ho’s geometric expression conveys a sense of Oriental philosophy and poeticness. Although he has been influenced by the hard-edge movement, he steps away from using thick, large color blocks; instead, he uses unadorned brushwork to create his image with lightness and briskness that resemble light-colored sketches. Although his forms do not seem to possess any perceptive function, one can still detect a variety of vocabularies from daily life and a sense of playfulness in his painting.

In the 50s, Ho was attracted to surrealist mysticism and automatism, and concentrated more on the transfiguration of images at that time. After he arrived in Europe, although he had gradually moved away from surrealism, his painting still demonstrated the dark, mystical colors and forms, showing a gloomy, melancholic and affluent atmosphere. After the 70s, Ho adopted the geometric style of hard-edge painting, and became immersed in creating forms and exact arrangement of space in painting. He renounced all symbols and existing rules to search for a fresh aesthetic standard. During this period, Ho leaned towards suprematism heralded by Malevitch, believing that geometric forms were a vehicle of colors and focusing on different combinations of color blocks in the same color scheme. By doing so, he was able to achieve the goal similar to Malevitch’s statement: “the happy liberating touch of non-objectivity drew me out the ‘desert’ where only feeling is real.” After 2000, the colors in Ho’s painting became brighter and more delightful, and the contrast more unified and harmonious. His works in the following decade seemed to be even more inspired. He wielded his brush freely, letting his subconscious run without restraint. His colors were exuberant and vivid, and his forms conveyed a sense of stability and lightheartedness at times and a feeling of rhythmic repetition at others. He also created more concrete images. This body of works has integrated his two major creative styles over the past sixty years, revealing a type of geometric abstraction informed with a surrealist quality.

Due to the heartfelt invitation by the Villa Reale of Monza in the suburb of Milan, this retrospective of Ho Kan showcases the artist’s works created within a span of more than fifty years. The exhibition also features for the first time sculptures created from a collaboration between this diligent abstract master, who is more than eighty years old, and the realist sculptor, Yang Pei-Chen. In between the abstract and the concrete as well as painting and sculpture, these collaborative works collectively materialize an inner/mental space that is beyond colors and forms.

[Artist Introduction]

HO Kan was born in Nanjing, China. Before he came back and settled down in Taiwan, he had lived in Milan, Italy for five decades. Mentored by Li Chun-Shan, “the master of modern art in Taiwan,” Ho was known for his surrealist painting style. In 1957, he joined the Tongfang Art Group, and became one of the representative figures in Taiwanese modern art movement that peaked in the 1960s. In 1964, Ho moved to Milan, where he was influenced by Western artistic concepts, such as hard-edge abstraction. He then incorporated various Asian artistic elements, including calligraphy and seal carving, his work and created a minimalist yet highly poetic visual language that enabled him to form his unique style of Oriental lyrical abstraction.

Ho’s early work showed a surrealist style and was informed with a sense of mysticism and unusualness. At this early stage, he had already begun using geometric forms in his creations. After he moved to Mila, he fully focused on geometric abstraction and concentrated on exploring the nature of painting. He started with fundamental elements in painting, which were point, line, plane and color blocks, and later moved on to the study of the entire composition, in which he discovered the abstract expression suitable to his art. His painting usually starts with the element of point and evolves a philosophical arrangement of the image, in which each element exists in its own way. He adopts the method of reduction to create his work, rendering it simple yet poetic. His body of works forms an inclusive abstract world that echoes the Oriental philosophical concept that all things are mutually embracing and nurturing, which, in turn, gives birth to an infinite world. In 2016, Ho held a large respective at Taipei Fine Arts Museum, entitled Reverberations · HO KAN. His works have been exhibited extensively in Taiwan, China, Italy, Switzerland, etc.

Beyond Colors and Shapes—From the Curator's Perspective

The Villa Reale (royal palace) in Monza is holding a retrospective of the artist Ho Kan, who is considered one of the great pioneers of Chinese abstraction.

The exhibition is presenting works produced during an artistic career that has spanned almost sixty years, from the 1950s to the 2010s. It highlights his most emblematic abstract geometric paintings, and also traces the evolution of his art by presenting—for the first time—the works he painted in Taiwan in the 1950s. Also presented are his recent paintings and several sculptures produced in collaboration with the sculptor Yang Bei-Chen.

Ho Kan’s artistic career is marked by historical events that immerse us inexorably in the history of China and the extraordinary events that forced him to leave his country and seek refuge in Taiwan in 1949, and subsequently led him to embark for France in 1964 on the oil tanker “Vietnam”; he eventually settled in Milan, where he lived for fifty years.

At the end of the 1940s, he moved to Taiwan, where he gradually discovered Western art and learnt the technique of oil painting, which was relatively unknown in Asia at the time. In the new world that he discovered, he gradually discovered Western Surrealist and abstract art and learnt the technique of oil painting, which was relatively unknown in Asia at the time. The new discoveries enabled him to develop a contemporary style while expressing his deep cultural roots.

At a crossroads between East and West, he developed a unique art that led him to participate in the renewal of twentieth-century Chinese painting.

Room A

The 1950s–1970s: From Taipei to Milan

Ho Kan, who came from a family of scholars, was born in Nanjing in 1932. After his father’s premature death, he went to live with his grandfather Ho Rei, a renowned calligrapher who introduced him to art and taught him to paint. Several years later, he entered a military boarding school. Due to political events in China, he moved to Taiwan in 1949 and a year later he enrolled in the Department of Art of Taipei University of Education.

Finding the teaching too traditional, he joined Lee Chun-Shan’s famous studio in 1951, where he was encouraged by the master to develop his individual creativity. During this period, Ho Kan enriched his artistic vocabulary as he discovered new Western movements. He was attracted to the Surrealist style and was inspired to combine different spatial elements and subjects within the same picture. In 1956, Ho Kan joineded the Ton Fan Art Group, along with seven other artists and friends from Lee Chun-Shan’s studio. Breaking away from academicism, the group played a key role in the development of avant-garde art in Taiwan until it dissolved in 1971.

His fascination for Western painting led him to discover Europe and in 1964, he moved to Milan, where he lived for fifty years. He immediately focused on geometric abstraction, while maintaining his Asian cultural influences. During his first Milanese period, Ho Kan used dark blues and greens, echoing the melancholy he felt as a result of his recent exile.

Room B

The 1980s–90s: Calligraphic Signs and Forms

During this period Ho Kan used a broader and more exuberant palette of colors.

At first sight, some of his geometric works were closer to Western geometric abstract art, while others were more expressive. He painted small black lines, evoking disconnected Chinese characters that seem to float in the pictorial space, as though randomly blown by the wind. The fresh approach to the representation of signs, which was abstract and poetic, opened up an infinite imaginary repertoire. The circles, squares, triangles, and the space around these forms were all references to Chinese calligraphy, which he simplified, retaining only the structure.

Room C

The 2000s: A Perfect Fusion

Ho Kan developed his art and transformed Eastern and Western cultural duality a veritable fusion between the two cultures. This was a period of mastery in which Ho Kan succeeded in creating a perfect harmony between forms and colors. He used dark colors to attenuate the luminosity of colors such as red, orange, and green, which gave the composition perfect equilibrium.

In the series “Origine” and “Développement,” the use of small dots in his paintings was influenced by Chinese aesthetics: “a single touch of red amongst thousands and thousands of greens.”

Room E

Ho Kan Today: A Quest for Spirituality

This mature period also highlights the omnipresent spirituality in his artistic approach. The simplification of forms and the restricted use of color in his compositions echo Chan Buddhism and Taoism, which both advocate simplicity via a minimal use of colors and forms.

Throughout his artistic career, he has developed an abstract geometric style but has never succumbed to a pure geometric style; underlying his lines are the calligraphic vivacity and energy of his cultural heritage.

Room F

The Ambivalence of Abstraction

In this room the viewer is invited to contemplate the artist’s dreamlike world and the symbols he uses. One is tempted to imagine possible interpretations of visual elements that seem to exist in his paintings, in the same way that Chinese characters sometimes evoke figurative visual forms.

Although it is possible to discern figures (a colorful fish or a bird, for example), they are quite incidental. They happen to be coincidences that might correspond with the Taoist philosophy of Wei Wuwei (meaning “accomplishing without doing”).

So, is his art abstract or figurative? Ho Kan does not see this as particularly important—what really matters to him is the sheer pleasure of painting.