Time Pieces (2023, ongoing) is the first work you encounter. In a semicircular, darkened room, 43 screens of varying sizes form a constellation that immediately draws the eye. Cats in anime style, rotating planets, clouds, the Atomic Club, each screen plays something different, in cycles ranging from one second to twenty-four hours. Ho places popular visual culture alongside cosmic timescales and nuclear history to show how diverse and irreconcilable our concepts of time are. Linear, cyclical, sacred, time as perceived by animals, or the capitalist clock of the West is just one of many possible rhythms. The videos grip you: addictive but demanding. Ho relies heavily on prior knowledge, and the curatorial text becomes a necessary tool rather than a supplement.

Installed across from Time Pieces, P for Power (2026, ongoing) plays out on a single large screen. Made especially for the exhibition at BOZAR,^❶ the work consists of 30 real-time edited chapters built around a simple premise: a child’s voice, an AI chatbot, interrogating Ho about the nature of power. On screen, a theatrical video essay unfolds: found footage, animation, and AI-generated images in endlessly looping sequences. Van Gogh’s Pont de Langlois (1888) comes to life, gymnastic children suddenly sprout extra legs, an AI model replaces Leonardo DiCaprio in The Wolf of Wall Street with a South Asian child. The questions range across power in art, in religion, in nature, in politics, each chapter circling the same elusive concept. Inspired by Spinoza, Ho identifies a fundamental divide: for a Western observer, power is abstract, a delegation of authority; in many Eastern traditions, it is almost tangible, a concentrated energy entrusted to a strong leader. Yet each time the child demands a conclusion, Ho can only concede: “That’s unclear. And now go to bed.” No conclusion, only a reset.

Ho’s practice is philosophical at its core. His works invite not conclusion but shared inquiry. And sometimes the work buckles under the weight of its own ambitions, its dense web of references demanding more than most visitors are equipped to give. But maybe that is also precisely the point. The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia is, at its heart, a provocation: the suggestion that an alternative historical canon might be assembled, one that does not begin in the West and does not end there either. In a world where geopolitical categories are once again being redrawn by those with the power to end the conversation, an artist who refuses to accept those categories and who insists on building his own lexicon is more than welcome.