Ho Kan

Early Life and Education

Born in Nanjing, China, but growing up in Taiwan, Ho Kan developed a love for art from his grandfather, who was a master calligrapher. After attending Taipei Normal School, he went to study Western modern art at Li Zhon Shang’s studio in 1950.

Artworks

Harmonising The East and The West

In 1956, Ho Kan formed the Ton-Fan Group with his contemporaries including Li Yuan-chia, Wu Hao, and Hsiao Ming-hsien, who shared a passion for merging elements of traditional Chinese and Western art—in particular American abstraction—to revolutionise Chinese painting. One of Taiwan’s first modern artist groups, the Ton-Fan Group was often discussed called ‘The Eight Bandits’ or ’ The Eight Rebels’ (八大響馬) by the media for rejecting artistic conventions and academic training.

Ho Kan’s early works were concerned with ‘mental images’, in which he would capture abstracted images of animals in a muted colour palette such as in Untitled (1960). Simple geometric shapes of the circle, triangle, and squares began to enter Ho’s paintings more frequently in the mid-1960s, following his move to Italy, and the following decade saw the artist introduce brighter and denser colours to his canvases, using short lines and composition.

Exhibitions

Ho Kan participated in the Ton-Fan group’s first exhibition in Taipei in 1957. In the following years, the group went on to exhibit in Europe and the United States.

Ho Kan has held numerous solo exhibitions, with the more recent examples including Geometric Calligraphy, Eli Klein Gallery, New York (2021); Spring Rhythm, Duo Gallery, Shanghai (2018); Moon Gallery, Taichung (2015); Gallery Mine d’Arts, Geneva (2011).

Selected group exhibitions include Painting from Taiwan, Eli Klein Gallery (2019); Lineage II: Li Chun Shan and Varied Voices, Double Square Gallery, Taipei (2019); Beyond Colours and Shapes a retrospective of Ho Kan, Villa Reale de Monza, Italy (2018); HSIA Yan and His Times, Eslite Gallery, Taipei (2018).

Carren Wong | Ocula | 2021