Ho Kan: Line, Shape, and Color

This first English book about Ho Kan, a pioneering Chinese artist who lived in Milan from 1964 to 2014, features exceptional artworks and groundbreaking research.

Ho Kan’s pioneering work is a meeting of many worlds, bringing together ideas and inspiration that are as rooted in notions of East and West as they are in the past and present. Delicately balanced on the cusp of Western geometry, and on the lines, shapes, and forms of Chinese characters, this book traces the artist’s creative trajectory from his co-founding of the radical Ton Fan Group in Taipei to the dynamic cultural milieu of 1960s Milan, the city he lived in until 2014.

Featuring some 200 exceptional illustrations of the artist’s life and work, comprehensive critical research, and personal interviews with Ho Kan, the essays in this book explore the artist’s interactions and experiences in Taipei and Milan alongside those of other Italian and international artists from that period, mapping his artistic journey from surrealism toward abstraction, laying out his extraordinary legacy as a leading transcultural artist.

Flavia Frigeri is an art historian, lecturer, and Chanel Curator for the Collection at the National Portrait Gallery, London. Lesley Ma is the inaugural Ming Chu Hsu and Daniel Xu Associate Curator of Asian Art in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Raffaele Bedarida is Associate Professor of Art History at Cooper Union, New York, where he directs the History and Theory of Art program.