text by Victoria Y. Lu
Art is a relentless pursuit of the ultimate perfection.
Most people consider art as a luxury that is within sight but beyond reach. Unlike them, Joyce Ho holds her innate artistic world as her most treasured and private spiritual garden. In this garden she works diligently, as if the field of flowers and trees were born for her.
Joyce Ho was born in Taiwan in 1983, and moved to the U.S. to further her education at the age of 14. She later joined the Department of International Relations at the University of California in Irvine. There, she fell in love with graffiti, and at night participated in graffiti-related adventure activities. After graduation, Joyce Ho returned to Taiwan and joined the circle of avant-garde theater, where she worked together with the renowned Taiwanese director of the Riverbed Theater Company, Craig Quintero. She did not have the slightest hesitation during this process, even though her decision was regarded by her family as somewhat insane.
Art, from her perspective, is a destined relationship as garden to the gardener: depending on each other, and achieving prosperity together. Joyce Ho often mentions that she doesn’t remember the moment she fell in love with art; she just remembers having a fascination with art since childhood. As far as she could recall, her drawing skill originated as naturally as the grasp of the pencil. She never intentionally learned art until the end of her first solo exhibition in 2008, where she decided to go to an art school. In reality, the journey of Joyce Ho to College of Liberal Arts at the University of Iowa served nothing more than a complement to her life as an artist; she had already been chosen by heaven as a cultivator of arts. Her stay in college merely added a road sign to the garden, but she had been inside it all along.
The privacy and mystery of the codependent relationship between Joyce Ho and art allow her painting style to be naturally formed. Through it, she directly and instinctively depicts the sentiments of her inner world towards life, and the people closest to her, her family, and herself. Joyce Ho has a preference of utilizing a bright tone of yellow, which in ancient China only the royal family was allowed to use. In her eyes, only solemn colors such as this can illustrate the tense relationship between the spiritual worlds of every person. The characters of her creation seem to be frozen in the instant of their confessions, seconds before they reveal their innermost thoughts, thus leaving the audience with the curiosity of the things to follow: What now? What happens next?
Joyce Ho’s paintings are her graceful image given by nature, and through them she strives to convey her perceptions in their purest form, without the influence of other artists. Her independent and confident nature reflects her fearless and difficult-to-approach monologue. Her sincere and unique style is the reason her name quickly achieved recognition in the art scene; she had her own image from the very beginning.
From a theoretical analysis perspective, Joyce Ho’s paintings tend to have a “psychoanalytical” magical realistic style, but uses flat colors to represent characters and especially the background. This peculiarity differentiates her style to the European and Central-South American magical realism. Craig Quintero once said that Animamix art possesses bright colors, plasticized palette, and disproportion in the anatomy of its characters. Joyce Ho’s works, whether painting or sculptures, are equipped with these elements and thus have become very important when researching the art of Animamix.
Joyce Ho is a classic Animamix all-around artist. She is involved in the Internet company Animamix.Net, collaborations with fashion brands, and serves as a multi-purpose role in the avant-garde theater from performance and production, to art design, and stage construction – devoting herself in the details of the works. Her art is a beautiful flower bloomed by her efforts, reborn season after season, never ceasing to amaze the audience.
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