S F Ho: Triple Burner Flower Field
Surrey Art Gallery, Surrey, BC - To Dec 6
At the centre of multidisciplinary artist S F Ho’s exhibition is Triple Burner Flower Field, a clay floor sculpture placed in a spiral shape that refers to the oracle bone character for 回, the Chinese character for “return to.” Surrounding the sculpture are silk banners hand-dyed with tea and yarrow. Printed on the banners is the oracle bone character. Taken together, the installation is a looping system that recalls the plant origins of the characters that became Chinese script.
Ho, whose family background is in Traditional Chinese Medicine, has this to say about their work: “The exhibition points to a holistic way of understanding the micro- and macrocosmic dimensions of the social and corporeal body. Medicinal processes are externalized into structures and systems as metaphors of how we can sustain the land that sustains us.” This in contrast to a Western medical system whose tendency has been to treat the symptom, not the root cause.
In their bio, Ho self-identifies as “a porous object” living “on the unceded ̓ territories of the xwməθkwəy̓ əm, Sḵwx̱ wú7mesh, and səlílwətaʔɬ peoples. Operating somewhere between words and whatever words can’t be, their work is sustained through feminist methodologies, land- based practices, and grassroots community networks.” Ho has presented art through SFU Galleries, Hangar (Lisbon), Art Metropole (Toronto), Agnes Etherington Art Centre (Kingston, ON), Galerie oqbo (Berlin), RAM galleri (Oslo), Western Front (Vancouver), the University of Toronto’s Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, the Vancouver Art Gallery and Oxygen Art Centre (Nelson). They published a book about love and aliens called George the Parasite.
