“What people need is beautiful, comforting stories that make them feel as if their lives have some meaning. Which is where religion comes from.”
-- Haruki Murakami, Japenese author
Exhibiting for the first time in Paris, with the new series “I don’t understand your sorrow” is a reflection of the artist’s inner most fear: Loneliness.
Hong kong artist born in 1990, Vivian Ho thinks the loneliest form of loneliness happens when surrounded by other people and the busy happenings in the city. Contrasting the feeling of emptiness with imaginative pleasantness, she presents a bizarre, if not pessimistic, mental state of the crowded city of Hong Kong.
The social norms and standards are constraints which make Vivian Ho feel trapped, as an Asian female painter.
It is all a matter of perception. By adding surrealistic elements to the mundane city life scenery, she challenges the conventional way of being a mere cog in the wheel of the machine, that is life.
On the other side, introspectively, this series presents her immense fear of being alone to an extent that she develops “beautiful, comforting” stories when escaping from anxiety.
