Opening: February 4, 6–8 pm
Exhibition dates: February 5–28, 2026
In now that i look back it was all falling apart but the pieces were all there, Michael Rikio Ming Hee Ho’s newest body of work operates as a coordinated system of references, a visual and linguistic lexicon built from the unresolved tensions of belonging. Rooted in the polyethnic, creole culture of Hawai‘i, Ho navigates an identity inherited through cultural remnants that are felt but never fully claimed. The work satires, while also moving beyond, the orientalized, picturesque tropes of the islands to confront a post-social media condition defined by a pervasive insecurity and a compulsive need for self-categorization. But what emerges through imagery and language departs from what may initially read as Ho’s biographical narrative of home. Rather, it’s a constellation of memory, not strictly that of Ho, but the core infrastructure of memory itself. Archival scraps, local ephemera, and intimate confessions operate symbiotically. Each one incomplete on its own, but together creating an emotional atmosphere that feels romantically familiar.
The canvas panels, seemingly floating on the ethereal walls of the gallery, take the form of trompe-l’oeil boxes, materially small yet spatially assertive. They adopt a social stance, posturing and claiming attention like a body in conversation; a child leans upward to speak and their parent tilts downward to meet them. The surfaces of the box become a storage site, where collaged images and phrases accumulate like keepsakes. It carries a tactile familiarity, alluding to sentimental vessels, like a sticker-covered diary crowded with photos and ephemera.
Language, text, phrases appear and recur as handwritten sticky notes or printed stickers modeled after public signage, or farmers market ads, or nature preservation PSAs, layered alongside nostalgic, flash-lit photographs that feel like documents of an innocent past, ruminating on the traditions and values they once carried. The phrases, some in Hawaiian Pidgin (Hawaiian Creole English), echo reminders to oneself, local mantras, or community slogans. But rather than affirming identity, they perform it. Perhaps it is a kind of cultural ventriloquism, repeating a bit of sincerity and satire, a bit of belonging and estrangement. These beautifully simplistic yet convoluted expressions of language are performances, they’re gestures toward a self and a place that many of us are still trying to locate.
It’s an emotional archeology of the “local, ” asserting that selfhood is a fragile composition of inherited-habits and traditions, memories of flavors and objects, disparate collections of moments meticulously gathered and held close to the soul.
