Michael Ho’s film Echoes from the Void re-examines the formula of the popular children’s game Chinese Whispers, in which one person whispers a message to another, passing it through a line of people until the last player announces the message to the entire group. Through the retelling of the story, errors typically start to accumulate, leading to an erosion of truth. Chinese Whispers not only discuss moral values or how facts get turned into fiction, but also reveal the complex social-political issues underlining the nature of storytelling and its manipulation within our realities, whilst also alluding to racial connotations.
In doing so, Echoes from the Void acts as a cultural criticism and aims to discuss East-Asian diasporic experiences through the exposure of the mechanisms underlining contemporary storytelling within a time of a resurgence of the Yellow Peril. It riffs through different subject matters, linking and morphing truths to fictions, past to present, Eastern ideologies to Western ones and ultimately surfaces the true problematic scale of misinformation and the ways in which mis- and disinformation are produced, disseminated, and consumed today.
The film was commissioned by the Film and Video Umbrella (FVU). The work also received support from, and was acquired by the M Art Foundation.
Michael Ho (b. 1991, Arnhem, Netherlands) lives and works in London. Ho graduated from the Architectural Association in 2019. As a second generation immigrant from China, Ho’s works investigate the notions of the Chinese diaspora, cultural mismatch, and subsequently cultural rediscovery through his painting practice. He employs a specific technique of painting from back to front, superimposing diluted images with resolved brush strokes, clashing Eastern traditions with Western aesthetics. Ho’s critical engagement with the orientalist images and tropes is multifold: from the playful to the political and from the erotic to the domestic. His solo exhibitions and projects include: Grotto Heavens, Gallery Vacancy, Shanghai, 2023 and Tryst, Gallery Vacancy at Frieze London, 2022. Ho’s film projects have been screened at Piccadilly Circus, London and at the ICA, London. His newly commissioned video work by FVU, London is part of the group exhibition Hollow Earth: Art, Caves & the Subterranean Imaginary at Nottingham Contemporary, co-organized with Hayward Gallery Touring. Ho’s works are in the collections of Asymmetry Art Foundation, London; By Art Matters Museum, Hangzhou; Domus Collection, New York; Labora Collection, Dallas; Longlati Foundation, Shanghai; and X Museum, Beijing.
