Horror Scroll

Horror Scroll, made in 2020 and tagged as literary, calls on the long horizontal narrative format of the handscroll. Japanese pictorial tradition has its own register of horror in the medieval emaki—the jigoku-zōshi (hell scrolls) and the yōkai picture rolls—which present narrative terror as sequential image read across an unfolding length. Ho's training in mokuhanga places her within reach of this lineage even where, as here, the work is executed in linocut. The relief block, with its capacity for emphatic black and silhouette, suits horror imagery; the scroll format extends the horror across time as the viewer's eye travels, rather than concentrating it within a single frame. The 2020 date inevitably colours the subject: the year produced its own sequential anxieties, registered in many printmakers' diaristic output. Horror Scroll fits Ho's wider practice of serial, narratively structured works produced as unfolding sheets or accordion books.