Orchis (book five)

"Orchis (book five)" is the fifth volume in Wuon-Gean Ho's serialised botanical cycle dedicated to the orchid family, produced in 2015 as an accordion-fold artist's book combining screenprint with monoprint. The orihon format—long folded paper that opens out into a continuous horizontal field—is central to Ho's practice and allows the imagery to be read as a sequence, an unfolded panorama, or a sculptural object standing on a shelf. The screenprint layer carries the editionable, repeated framework of the book—likely orchid forms, taxonomic labels, or text fragments—while the monoprint passes ensure that no two copies are identical, a strategy Ho uses to push printmaking toward the unique drawn mark. The Literary tag points to text-image interplay: Ho's books often weave personal writing, botanical Latin, or cited poetry into the visual field. Orchis sits within her broader catalogue of artists' books, which range from intimate pocket diaries to longer serialised cycles examining family, plant life, gender, and memory, all delivered in a hand-finished codex format intended to be turned, folded, and inhabited.