The ceramicist Sin-ying Ho has one foot firmly planted in two continents, but don’t call her a bridge-builder.
“I am the bridge,” she said in a phone interview this week. Ho was born in Hong Kong, immigrated to Canada in 1995 and currently lives in New York City, where she is an assistant professor of art at Queens College. An exhibition of her porcelain work, “Past Forward,” is on view in the Hood Downtown, in Hanover, through May 27.
There will be a public reception Friday night from 5 to 7, and an informal discussion with Ho and director of the Hood Museum of Art John Stomberg on Saturday afternoon from 2 to 3. Both events take place at the Hood Downtown, on Main Street.
Ho’s diverse oeuvre of vessels and sculptures approach a historical Chinese tradition with a 21st-century sensibility, reflecting her experience of the world as a “global village,” she said. She assembles her pieces from different parts, and glazes them with distinct colors and patterns to emphasize these “cut-and-paste” origins.
She prefers the term “vessel” over “vase” because you’re not meant to keep flowers in them, but she is drawn to making vase-like forms because they are analogous to the human body.
“(W)hen you study ceramics, you talk about it having a shoulder, lip, belly, foot. It sounds like a figure, but I don’t want to do figurative,” she said. “So I feel the form is familiar but unfamiliar … so you can use that as a metaphor to talk about humans.”
The fragmented appearance of these pieces can be seen as a metaphor for her own identity, she said.
“I feel like I myself am fragmented. But it is not a negative thing. It’s how I’ve been formed,” she said.
Her tallest piece in the Hood Downtown show is also one whose name aptly encapsulates her vision: One World, Many People. It’s 77 inches tall, but the unfired version was even taller — the kiln causes the vessels to shrink by around 20 percent, Ho said.
“I wanted the physical challenge,” laughed Ho, who at 5 feet, 1 inch tall, got her wish. “It was like a giant for me … Now when I work small, I have a different feeling.”
EmmaJean Holley can be reached at ejholley@vnews.com or 603-727-3216.