For her third solo show, which runs until May 30, Hong Kong artist Chloe Ho presents five series of portraits to make a “Sea of Faces” at Hong Kong’s 3812 Gallery.Across these five series, Ho experiments with multiple mediums and tries to capture the particular essence of her sitters. Although the artist seems to favor charcoal as a foundation for her portraits, embellishments and details are often added with Chinese ink, spray paint, acrylic, or even coffee to create the image. Speaking about this use of multiple implements, Ho states in a press release that they speak “to the artist's struggle to understand and portray identity.”This interest in identity sees Ho following many artists before her in looking to Shakespeare, trying to understand his characters through portraiture. In her series “Shakespeare Envisioned,” she presents contemporary re-imaginings in charcoal of some of the Bard’s most famous theatrical creations. These vary from the conventional “Hamlet,” 2011, with the Danish prince in a button-down shirt typical of any young man, to the most fantastical “Macduff,” which strangely puts Macbeth’s antagonist in a homoerotic leather bondage harness, baseball cap and sunglasses to create a character far more at home at San Francisco’s Folsom Street in the California of Ho’s birth than the Scottish highlands of the play.Her other series are ordered according to theme, which each group united by their medium. In her “Isolation” group, for example, ink and charcoal are used to draw simple lines unconnected to each other, which represents to the artist “how all people live in a state of solitude at one point or another.” In another set, “Identity,” she uses more free-flowing media like spray paint to suggest “the fluidity of all human identities.”“Chloe Ho: Sea of Faces” runs through May 30 at 3812 Gallery, Hong Kong
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