HART HAUS is pleased to present “and i love you dearly”, a solo exhibition by Michael Rikio Ming Hee Ho to conclude his international artist residency at HART HAUS over the period of February 2026 till date. The exhibition features a compelling new body of work that intricately weaves together poetry, text, and painting, reimagining the canvas as a site to examine nostalgia, memory, and identity.
Across the exhibition, Ho approaches landscapes where beauty carries both the weight of memory and the architecture of romantic self-fiction. Ho considers how once-familiar places survive in the mind, using text and imagery as landscape, slowly altered by time, displacement, and the distortions of nostalgia. His phrases and text-elements read like a private archive of "notes to self"— fragments “typed into your phone after a long call with your parents”, where comfort, anxiety, and a delusional kind of whimsy begin speaking in the same voice. His recurring practice invites viewers to observe how environments once familiar persist within the mind shift under the pressure of time, displacement, and the internal necessity of remembering.
Through a practice that interweaves poetry, text, and painting on shaped canvases, Ho treats language as a physical material, inviting viewers into the emotionally charged space between the thought and the transcription of the thought into inner dialogue . “and i love you dearly” stays with the strange comfort of looking back, even when “home” begins to feel like a story you kept telling yourself. Ho’s artistic language—informed by a transpacific sensibility shaped by his upbringing in Hawaiʻi and his international trajectory through Tokyo and Hong Kong —emerges through an unusually direct relationship, almost tactile relationship with words. Having studied fine art and linguistics at UCLA under influential artists including Barbara Kruger and Adrian Wong, he developed an interest in how words carry emotional registers as much as they convey meaning—an instrument that can console, unsettle, and stabilise. In this body of work, Ho continues to explore how identity and belonging are carried through fragments: phrases, images, and emotional textures that serve as psychological anchors even as their meanings shift.
In this new presentation, Ho engages identity not as a stable essence, but as something inherited, partial, felt—a continuous process of negotiation. His practice uses shaped canvas panels and trompe-l’oeil strategies to blur the boundary between painting and object, allowing the text to project toward the viewer. The works accumulate phrases and images in a manner reminiscent of how memory gathers keepsakes to navigate the present.
Ho’s residency at HART HAUS offered an especially productive space for this exploration. During his residency at HART HAUS, Ho found in Hong Kong a site of intimate distance—connected to his Cantonese heritage, yet experienced as a space of active negotiation. The exhibition ultimately holds space for the uncertainty of reflection: a tenderness toward the past, paired with an awareness that the self is always being composed in real time. Across Hawaiʻi, Tokyo, and Hong Kong, his works function as prisms through which the beauty and desolation of environments are intensified, re-examined, and translated into new, restorative visual forms.
“and i love you dearly” embraces the strange comfort found in reflection—where “home” becomes less a destination than a story we continue to tell ourselves to stay whole.
General Visit 公眾參觀
Date日期：9.5 - 4.6.2026 (Tue - Sat 二至六)
Time 時間：11:00 - 18:30
Venue 地點：HART HAUS 3/F
Visit by appointment only 敬請預約
About the Artist 藝術家簡介
Michael Rikio Ming Hee Ho (b. 1996, Kamuela, Hawaiʻi) is a Japanese and Cantonese American artist based in Tokyo. His practice utilizes a coordinated system of language, collage logic, and trompe-l’œil painting to examine the mechanisms of emotional insulation and the performative nature of selfhood in a post-social-media landscape.
Developed in response to the compressed urban scale of Tokyo, Ho’s works often take the shape of trompe-l’œil box forms. These structures function as surrogates for the body, asserting a physical presence through posture, leaning or tilting to mimic the dynamics of a conversation. The surfaces of these forms act as archival sites where familiar and nostalgic imagery, personal ephemera, and linguistic ruminations accumulate.
By layering text that mirrors the cadence of unsent late-night messages and internal monologues, Ho explores a contemporary condition defined by an oscillation, between wry optimism and self-aware insecurity. The performance of identity in his work serves both as a critique of a compulsive self-categorization and as a symptom of cultural dislocation.