Ho-Kan

Biography

In 1949 the seventeen-year-old Ho-Kan arrived in Taiwan with the teachers and fellow pupils of his Nanjing school for the children of fallen soldiers. He had been born in Nanjing on 23 July 1932, and his real name was Huo Xuegang (Ho Hsüeh-kang). During the war his family lived in Chongqing; after his father died they returned to Nanjing, to live with his grandfather.

His grandfather, Huo Rui, was a well-known calligrapher. From him Ho-Kan acquired a good hand and a taste for drawing; as a teenager, by his own account, he decided to become an artist.

In 1950 he entered the art department of Taipei Normal School, a teacher-training college, and in 1951, on the recommendation of Ouyang Wenyuan, joined the studio of Li Zhongsheng. Li did not teach technique but asked his pupils to “look” and to “search”: to see an object whole and to find what mattered in it. After graduating in 1953, Ho-Kan taught at a primary school in the Jingmei district of Taipei and secured the opening there of the first school art classroom in Taiwan. From 1957 he worked as an art education instructor with a provincial team that assisted schools, and he sent children’s drawings to an exhibition in Spain.

In 1956, together with seven friends (Li Yuanjia, Wu Hao, Ouyang Wenyuan, Xia Yang, Xiao Qin, Chen Daoming and Xiao Mingxian), he founded the Ton Fan group, the Eastern Painting Group. They were nicknamed the “Eight Outlaws”. Their first exhibition took place in Taipei in 1957, and in 1960 the group was invited to a gallery in New York. Among Ho-Kan’s work of those years there are many small drawings in pencil and crayon: distorted figures of birds and animals in muted, dark tones, with a surrealist cast.

In 1964 he sailed for Europe on a French ship, intending to study in France. He could not obtain a visa and stopped in Milan. As it turned out, he stayed there for about half a century. There were too many surrealists around, and he became absorbed in geometric abstraction. He was influenced by Mondrian, Josef Albers and Antonio Calderara. To set himself apart from his Western colleagues, he brought Chinese calligraphy, the idea of emptiness and an even, flat application of colour into his painting. Triangles and rectangles are crossed by thin lines and dots; critics connect this with his love of music, since he collected records and worked to them.

From 1965 he worked with the Milan gallery Artecentro and held several dozen solo exhibitions there. In 1965 and 1966 he won prizes in Gubbio, in 1966 a gold medal in Novara, in 1967 a first prize in Monza, and in 1969 the first Giuseppe Moli prize in Lecco. From the 1980s he took motifs from ancient Chinese ritual vessels and the patterns of Han dynasty bricks.

He first returned to Taipei with an exhibition in 1985, twenty years after leaving. In 1997 he received a lifetime achievement award from the Li Zhongsheng Foundation. In 2006 he worked for several months in a studio in Beijing’s 798 district, and in 2009–2012 he spent about three months each year at the Taipei International Artist Village. It seems telling to me that his manner visibly changes after these trips, though this cannot be asserted firmly. Among his late series are paintings on round canvases with a black ground, begun in 2021.