Holding Air

Made in 2019, Holding Air precedes the pandemic by a year but anticipates the changed valence that breath and proximity would acquire in 2020. The title gestures toward the paradox of grasping the ungraspable—a recurring concern in Ho's work, which frequently addresses bodily memory, gesture, and what cannot be physically retained. Linocut suits this subject: the relief block reduces an image to inked and uninked surface, and the binary forces a clear decision about what the cutter chooses to show as solid and what is left as the white of the paper. In Ho's hands the medium has long served as a vehicle for diaristic, observational subjects rendered at compact scale. Holding Air sits within that lineage of personal narrative made through the relief block, alongside the small print cycles and accordion-folded artists' books that have remained a steady thread in her practice.