Asia
Ho Rui An
Screen Green
2015-2016
Screen Green, 2015 – 16. Lecture and video installation with green screen, dimensions variable.
Ho Rui An’s lecture performance, Screen Green takes the telecast of a speech made by the Prime Minister of Singapore, Lee Hsien Loong, during which he was pictured against a homogenous green backdrop commonly used for visual effects or post-production in film, as a point of departure. Taking the lush, botanical landscape of Singapore, administered through a series of governmental gardening efforts, Ho offers a speculative narrative through the metaphor of a space of future possibilities that are simultaneously a method to limit and modulate its citizens.
The artist, writer, and researcher Ho Rui An probes histories of globalization and governance, performing a detournement of dominant semiotic systems across text, film, installation, and lecture. Ho’s work investigates the emergence, transmission, and disappearance of images within the contexts of liberal hospitality, participatory democracy, and speculative futures. Questioning the borders between pedagogy and artistic practice, image and meaning, Ho’s artistic output diverges from traditionally structured postcolonial critique, proposing new frameworks for artistic and scholarly innovation. Breaking from Western avant-garde paradigms of performance lecture as immanent critique, Ho’s practice generally explores the latent potential in imaginatively refigured pedagogy as both a medium and subject. His performances are intricate, genealogical tracings of the means by which diverse images of power across Asia find surprising relations, moving freely across topics and sources. His works are often installed as sculptural extensions to his performance lectures, incorporating additional mediating factors for the audience’s experience, including idiosyncratic seating, backdrops, or physical props.