(Professor in Contemporary Art Practice Faculty of Art, Architecture and Design, The University of Lincoln United Kingdom)
What are these strange drawings? Are they drawings at all or building blocks
towards the construction of first utterances and faltering steps? Or perhaps
they are new mnemonics for some new kind of cult, a means of subtle
communications still in gestation?
There is something of a secret language here, a language so secret, so
afraid of being read by the wrong person that it is unable to trust even
itself. Everything is deeply coded. Aware of its limitations, its inability to
speak, this is some form of rebus intended to for a reader not yet emerged
fully out of a deep sleep.
This language, when it speaks, speaks in dreams.
Where do these drawings stop and where do they start? In the mind or on
the page?
Or maybe these are entirely the wrong questions.
Perhaps I should try to ask, what is the status of these drawings? Are they
are an infinite potential? Is there a well in all of us that could give up
these images?
The images have the qualities of myth. As Roger Scruton observes, “myth
asks of something to be believed, without being believed as true” ( note )
But these drawings/images are more then an exercise in communications,
codes and incommunicability. This project is not only a mode of speaking about
things which are impossible to speak about; it is about the very formation of
such a language in some form of becoming.
It is small wonder then that some of the forms are chrysalis like.
Shapes become buildings, or letters, or both (like Michel de Certeau’s
rhetorical sky scrapers which textualise NY), forms are becoming other forms
everywhere, hybrids abound and what becomes visible are not only the drawings
themselves but the act of imagining; the act of drawing becoming itself, the
act of bringing something forth and offering it to another mind.
These drawings speak of disasters, and as ciphers, they are a disaster. They are mute and
inexplicable, initially ripe with potential meanings but then refusing to give
anything away like some coy lover. They appear cathartic, but also blank. The
apocalypse is funny, it is personal.
There are mushroom clouds which look more like mushrooms than a mushroom
cloud should, there is a dead-pan re-telling of a suicidal thought, so oddly
dispassionate it reduces the thought to mere foolishness, there are severed
heads and a maze that insists it is blue (how deluded, how foolish, how can
shape be colour and not a shape?).
Taken individually the drawings are sometimes funny, plaintive and/or
hysterical, yet as a group, they do go somewhere else. There are qualities of
random thoughts here, not daydreams, but the more intense thoughts which bubble
up without introduction, often unwelcome but nevertheless necessary. They
emerge out a disturbed and disturbing world, an inner world certainly but one
which all too is aware of the limitations of language and about the
transformation of language, indeed about transforming anything and everything,
and about its own becoming.
MK Ho will draw on anything, anywhere and anytime, whilst eating dinner
or, watching TV, just to draw and keep drawing these cryptic, ambiguous non
sequiturs, these baffling, absurd, mute but impotent balloon men and collapsing
letter buildings, all which have the characteristics of a pun but without the
punch-line.
MK Ho draws in spite of herself and out of spite towards herself, but
she must also draw in another sense. In
English the word draw can also mean to pull, or drag something. In this meaning
MK Ho must draw these images out, yank them from the anchoring points and place
them on a page, a cathartic act which constantly must renew itself. Dislodging
the image from its attendant sensations, the image becomes empty once again.
After all, what is the genus of an image? Is it the thing that rings
true with the minds eye? The image is something which surpasses its
representation. That which is part of photography but not a photograph, that
which is often part of drawing but not a drawing, that which is part of an
object but not an object, that which can be housed in the digital but is not
digital These drawings are things done, certainly, they are made and continue
to be made, edited and displayed but they are also transferences from mind to
mind, inner eye to inner eye, by the mechanism of ink, paper, space and optical
nerves.
The drawings themselves are intermediaries, channels and conduits and as
such need to be as clear as possible so the images within them can reach their
destinations. Hence the fact that these drawings are oddly without ‘qualities’
to speak of, at least without the properties that might be interesting to
discuss them solely as ‘drawings’. Though MK Ho may indeed be drawing them,
they are more, or less then drawings.
They are transfers, pressed against the screen of the world of which I
am on one side and MK Ho is on the other. The screen is translucent; all her
drawings bleed from one side to the other. They are not drawn but placed, put
down, settled down even, here and there. They are gently rubbed over, pressed,
impressed, and they are ONE mark, one continuous mark and one continuous image.
In this sense perhaps they are images arising from the potentially infinite
image bank of an inner world.
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M.K.Ho斷裂思緒間的慧眼
/Steve Dutton
這些奇特的圖畫到底是甚麼? 或者，是否能稱它們為圖畫抑或象徵首次發聲、跨出顫巍巍第一步前的準備階段? 抑或是新教派的公式? 尚處構思期的密語?
這些圖案傳達出某種祕語，使用的語言極為私密，似乎害怕受他人誤讀，甚至對自身都有所保留，每張圖都是一套複雜難解的符碼，其創作語言之隱晦，無法與外界自由交流，像是一道道畫謎，等待尚未從沉睡中甦醒的讀者。
這語言，當它訴說時，是一種夢中的囈語。
這些畫始於何處? 終於何方? 畫紙上或是創作者的腦海中?
或許，這個問題本身即有錯誤。
或許，該問這些圖案處於何種狀態?尚具有無限創作可能? 人人心中是否都有一口井，能釋放出這些圖像? 這些圖像與神話的本質相似，如同羅傑．史克魯頓 (Roger Scruton)曾說：「神話期待讀者雖相信非真有其事，然閱讀時能信以為真。」
這些圖畫與意像並非單純是藝術傳達、符碼創造的練習或表達藝術不可交流的特性。此項作品不僅藉其模式傳遞無法言喻的事物，更反映了這種個別語言形化衍生的過程，可想而知，當中某些形式尚處於雛形階段。形體轉換為建築或化身為文字，甚或兩者合一（如法國思想家德瑟圖（Michel de Certeau）所論，摩天大樓的修辭學建構出紐約的城市文本。）；形式也各地不同，揉雜的混合體比比皆是。在眼前呈現的作品不只是圖像，觀者更可看到想像力的體現、圖像形成的過程，創作者傳達其思想並與觀者交流的意圖亦變得具體。
這些圖案訴說一場場災難，再以重重密碼鎖住，其實本身就是場災難。它們沉默而難懂，先是釋放出無限意涵，接著便嘎然而止，無聲無息，像個害羞忸怩的情人。它們看似一種宣洩，茫然的宣洩。不僅予人古怪的啟示，語言更極為私密。其中一張圖是蕈狀雲，然而看上去更像是磨菇而非雲朵；另有不斷表達出自縊的念頭，由於極其冷靜，讓念頭本身頓時變得滑稽；此外，還有斷頭的圖像，甚至有迷宮似的圖案，卻堅持是藍色。(多麼荒謬可笑! 怎能說圖形是一種顏色?)
若各別觀看每張圖案，它們有時或古怪、或哀愁、甚或可笑，但這些圖群集時則另有意涵，蘊含創作者的隨想，不僅是白日夢，而是突發無來由的念頭，往往令人不快然而卻必要，而這些念頭浮現受擾又擾人的內心世界，亦即受限於語言及語言的轉換，而更像是萬物轉換及其衍生的過程。
無論用餐或看電視時， MK Ho隨時隨地皆能創作，題材亦無限制，持續畫著神秘隱晦、荒謬難解、沉默無聲的圖像，不管是欲振乏力的氣球男、倒塌的文字建築，全都是一種未道破的雙關語。
創作對於MK Ho而言，是種不由自主的過程，也是其對自身不滿的洩憤管道，然而尚有其他原因。英文中「畫」這個動詞，亦帶有「拉、拖」的意思，由此觀之，MK Ho 有必要將這些圖像從心中「拉」出來，一把拖出再固定於畫紙上，是種需不斷重複的宣洩方式，這些圖一旦被逐出充滿感性的內心世界，便又轉為空盪沉默。
究竟該如何定位這些圖像? 可否看成以慧眼透視的真相？它們的意義超越其表象，雖非照片卻蘊含攝影美學，看似圖畫的一種卻也不是圖畫、看似某形體的局部、看似可歸於數位創作，卻又皆不盡然。它們並非未完成的作品，而是成品仍保有再創作的空間，不斷再創作、更改、展示，與此同時，透過墨水、畫紙、空間、視神經，圖像在觀者的眼裡、心中傳遞不息。
圖畫是傳遞的媒介管道，因此表達方式越明白，便越能達成溝通的目的。但這些圖畫則無法以此論之，至少它們缺乏被稱為「圖畫」的特性。雖然M.K Ho也許「畫」出這些圖，但這些作品並不完全等同於「圖」。創作者與筆者的世界間似有道透明玻璃幕，而作品印於玻璃幕上，扮演居間的傳渡者。MK Ho的畫作，透過玻璃幕滲到另一方，並不僅是畫，而是被四處擺放，被柔和的磨搓、壓印，形成一個共同的符號，一種不受時空限制的符號與意象，由此說來，它們也許是從無邊無際的內心想像世界中生成的意象。