Christopher K. Ho: Happy Birthday

Press Release

Winkleman Gallery is very pleased to present Happy Birthday, our first solo exhibition by New York artist Christopher K. Ho. In five new pieces, Ho explores how collaboration (willing or not) between protagonists of the art world—artists, collectors, critics, and gallerists—ascribes aesthetic and commercial value to an artist’s work.

Happy Birthday is a culmination of Ho’s decade-long collaborative practice. In all but one of the five works, Ho approaches collaboration as the very condition of possibility for contemporary art. This approach does not diverge from his previous, more literal, collaborations with other artists, but evidences a more complex understanding of collaboration an inherent characteristic of almost all art to be made manifest. Each work systematically, sometimes obliquely, and often humorously interrogates the inter-subjective relations between four of 16 possible pairings of protagonists. Additionally, the viewing public is implicated in Happy Birthday from Nuit and Happy Birthday to Mrs. X, which exist partially through word-of-mouth.

Happy Birthday consists predominantly of hints of previous transactions or agreements: a red dot accompanying the exhibition’s title; a catalogue featuring sited, ephemeral, works that have been retroactively priced; an actual birthday party during the opening reception; and a rumor (or two) about a change in gallery ownership. Ho’s exhibition operates within the prevalent context of commercial art, even as overall it denies the viewer the conspicuous signifiers of such a context. Rather than obvious items for sale or contemplation, the gallery is empty except for a somewhat hidden, monochromatic, life-sized sculpture of the gallerist, Ed Winkleman, in his “birthday suit.” As art historian and critic Nuit Banai notes in her accompanying catalogue essay, “[B]y using the commercial gallery as a microcosm, Ho begins from the recognition that spectacle has become ‘naturalized,’ making it impossible to criticize it from a position of exteriority. Working from within spectacle’s parameters, then, Ho….reveals his own implication within its mass-media apparatus and reflect on the degree to which subjects and objects are both formed by its mechanisms.”

Christopher K. Ho has exhibited at the Queens Museum of Art; the Jamaica Center for the Arts; the H.F. Johnson Museum of Art; Marvelli Lab; the Municipal Art Society of New York; the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council; Socrates Sculpture Park; Sara Meltzer Gallery, New York; the Asian American Art Center of New York; the Kunsthalle, Zurich; Galerie 5eme Etage, Paris; Tou Scene, Norway; and Fieldgate Gallery in London. He received his B.F.A. and B.S. from Cornell University and his M.Phil from Columbia University.

For additional information, please contact Edward Winkleman at 212.643.3152 or info@winkleman.com.