Wuon-Gean Ho

Wuon-Gean Ho (born 1973, Oxford) is a British-Chinese printmaker, artists' book maker, and animator whose practice combines Japanese mokuhanga, linocut, vinyl engraving, screenprinting, and intaglio. Her work moves between tightly observed personal narrative and broader meditations on memory, family, gender, and grief, often produced as long serialised cycles, accordion-folded artists' books, or pocket-sized print diaries. She is an Honorary Member of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers (RE) and a long-running figure in the international printmaking research community.

Born in Oxford to a family with Peranakan Chinese roots, Ho took an unusual double path through higher education. She read History of Art at Cambridge, completing her undergraduate dissertation Attitudes to Linocut as a Serious Printmaking Medium, and trained simultaneously as a veterinary surgeon, qualifying as MRCVS in 1998 — a parallel medical practice she has maintained alongside her studio career. In 1998 she received a Japanese Government (Monbusho) Scholarship to study at Kyoto Seika University as a research student in Japanese woodblock printmaking, working there until 2000 under the master mokuhanga artist Akira Kurosaki. She returned to Kyoto Seika as a research student again in 2005 to deepen her practice. From 2013 to 2016 she completed an MA in Printmaking at the Royal College of Art with Distinction, and in 2020 she began a practice-based PhD at the University of the West of England on tacit knowledge in relief printmaking processes.

Her printmaking sits at the intersection of the relief tradition Kurosaki taught her and the linocut and engraved-vinyl methods she has developed since. Recurring projects include Mask Series (2008-2009), Sleeper (2008-2009), Lucid Mask (2010, a sequence of twenty-nine engraved vinyl prints), Dancing Dress (2011), Shadow Dance (2010-2011), Swallow Span (2012), The Dancing Dresses (2013, an animation about the fifteenth-century Roman noblewoman Costanza), Orchis Library (2015, nine accordion-folded artists' books), the Diary of a Printmaker (2016-2024, a pocket-sized linocut diary of more than 170 images made for her father in care), the Covid Tales lockdown series (2020-2021), Looking for Dante (2023-2024, ten linocuts and a film responding to Dante's Inferno), and Leaves, Leaving, Left (2023, a drawing-based film). She designed the United Kingdom's Lunar Year Shengxiao coin series for the Royal Mint from 2014 to 2018, and in 2016 created The Emperor's Feast, eight panels for the HKK restaurant in London.

Ho's awards include the Birgit Skiöld Memorial Trust Prize for Embrace (2010), the British Institution Award at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition for Unending Forest (2014), First Prize at the Books of Desire competition at the Classense Library in Ravenna (2014), the Atelier Presse Papier Prize at the Biennale Internationale d'Estampe Contemporaine de Trois-Rivières in Canada (2017), Second Prize at the Orchis Library Libri Mai Mai Visti competition in Ravenna (2019), Honorary Membership of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers (2019), the Honorary Mention at the Trois-Rivières Biennial and the Norman Glaister Award at the Braziers International Film Festival (2021), and the Batsford Prize for Illustration (2022).

Her fellowships and residencies span four continents. From 2016 to 2018 she held a Print Fellowship at the Royal Academy Schools in London. Earlier residencies include Sitka Center for Arts and Ecology (2007), Caldera (2007), Aberystwyth School of Art in Wales (2009-2010), Bluecoat Arts Centre in Liverpool (2010), Opificio della Rosa in Italy (2011 and 2018), the Portland Chinese Classical Garden (2013), Xiaoxiang Print Institute at Changsha Normal University in China (2015), Crow's Shadow Institute of the Arts in Oregon (2017), and Atelier Presse Papier in Quebec (2017). Between 2019 and 2023 she held a Research Associate post at the Centre for Print Research at the University of the West of England, Bristol, where she founded and edited the peer-reviewed IMPACT Printmaking Journal. In 2022 she undertook a tour of US Visiting Artist appointments at the University of Charlotte, the University of Tennessee Knoxville, Indiana University Bloomington, the University of Utah, and the University of Hawai'i at Hilo.

Ho's work is held in collections at the British Museum, the National Art Library and Tate Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Aberystwyth University, Kennesaw State University, the University of Tennessee, Changsha Normal University, and Splitgrafic in Croatia. Recent solo exhibitions include Right Here Right Now: Stories from These Times at Davidson Galleries in Seattle (2022), Before I Forget at the Hong Kong Open Printshop (2023), a solo show at Linton Gallery in Cambridge (2023), and The Heart's Sight at the UB Art Galleries, University at Buffalo (2024). She has served as News Editor of Printmaking Today for five years and has presented papers and keynote addresses at IMPACT 6 Bristol (2009), IMPACT 7 Melbourne (2011), IMPACT 8 Dundee (2013), IMPACT 9 Hangzhou (2016), and IMPACT 12 Bristol (2022), as well as the International Mokuhanga Conference in Nara (2021).