Ho Kan's Retrospective at Villa Reale Monza Traces His Journey from Taipei to Milan

A retrospective of Chinese-born artist Ho Kan (b. 1932, Nanjing) is on view at Villa Reale in Monza, spanning his career from the 1950s to recent works. The exhibition, curated by Sabine Vazieux, is arranged chronologically across the palace's state rooms and piano nobile, contrasting with the neoclassical interiors. Ho Kan moved to Taipei in the 1950s to study at the Provincial Department of Fine Arts but left, finding it too academic, to study under painter Lee Chun-Shan. In 1956, he co-founded the anti-academic Ton Fan Art Group with seven other artists, which lasted until 1971. In 1964, he settled in Milan for fifty years, exploring oil painting and movements like Surrealism and Abstraction, while studying Cézanne, van Gogh, and Gauguin. Early works in Sala A show influences of Dalí and Ernst, with urgent, raw compositions. Art historian Hsiao Chong-Ray notes that while Ho Kan's abstract paintings resemble Western counterparts, they contain details rooted in Chinese sinograms—his grandfather was a calligrapher. Recurring symbolic elements like circles, triangles, and squares are hand-drawn without tools, conveying themes of spirituality, the four elements, the Trinity, masculinity and femininity, movement, and symmetry. The exhibition invites viewers to see this production balanced between two worlds, where paintings risk being seen as stylistic games—a risk only those who operate freely can take.