HO Kan
Abstract 2020-042
100x80cm
Oil on canvas
2020
Born in Nanjing, China, in 1932, Ho Kan is a pioneer of Chinese geometric abstraction, and a founding member of Ton Fan Painting Society, a renowned modern art group in Taiwan. He moved to Taiwan in 1949 to study modern art with Li Chun-Shan. In 1956, Ho Kan, and seven other painters foundedTon Fan to promote “the Taiwanese modern art movement,” and they have been known as the “Eight Great Outlaws” ever since.1 In 1964, Ho moved to Milan, Italy, where he lived before returning to settlein Taiwan in 2014.
Ho Kan’s early style was mainly surrealist, rendering his early works rather mysterious and spectacular.However, he had already begun exploring geometric shapes in his work during this period. After he moved to Milan, he established his individual use of abstract and geometric shapes, focusing on the essence of painting from basic elements: points, lines, planes, and color blocks. With these elements, he studies the overall composition to develop his unique abstract style. Influenced by Western artistic concepts such as hard-edge abstraction, Ho Kan integrates Eastern calligraphy and the art of seal carving with a minimalist yet poetic visual language to develop his distinctive, Eastern lyrical abstraction. He starts with elemental points, and, from them, he creates his own philosophy about the arrangement of the image, validating the existence of each element. Ho Kan further applies the method of reduction to his abstract art, constructing a more encompassing abstract world, which responds to the Eastern philosophical idea that all things are mutually embracing and complementing.