Oxygen Art Centre presents the exhibition, Triple Burner Flower Field by SF Ho, on view from January 15, 2025, to March 8, 2025
Ho was artist-in-residence at Oxygen through November and December 2024 where they developed new artworks that compose the exhibition and hosted reading group events to explore themes and topics associated with their practice.
An origin point for this body of work is a Chinese pictograph for the word “no”, said to represent a calyx, a root, or a bird flying into the sky. Ho is interested in questioning how the Chinese image of “no” underlies the linguistic, therapeutic, and ecological frameworks that run through Ho’s visual and text-based practices.
Triple Burner Flower Field attends to the use of common plants while speaking to first-generation settlers about agriculture and medicine. Ho drew on archival and oral accounts of the role of the barefoot doctor during the Cultural Revolution, the agricultural land defense movement in Hong Kong, and the early Chinese market gardens of Nelson, BC.
By highlighting the spiritual and medicinal uses of four plants: tea, yarrow, poppy and mugwort, the exhibition examines how life is separated into the categories of useful commodities or invasive weeds within the framework of global capitalism.
Using emptiness and manifold duality as guiding principles, art making becomes a kind of serious play that points to interdependence with land and beings while eschewing human supremacy. Triple Burner Flower Field includes an installation of ceramics, textiles and scent pieces, as well as a video featuring interviews with Wang Zhao and Ling Yin and an original musical arrangement by the artist.
The exhibition Triple Burner Flower Field by SF Ho will be on view at Oxygen Art Centre from January 15, 2025, to March 8, 2025. Free to attend, the centre will be open to the public Wednesdays to Saturdays from 1:00 PM to 5:00 PM during exhibition run.
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