Who is Vera?
Objectively speaking, Vera is a middle-aged woman, a performer.
According to the artist, Vera is a character, a vessel, a medium through which her creative practice is carried and transformed.
In Ho’s work, Vera always remain expressionless, dressed in a white blouse and black trousers.

In Vera, Joyce Ho’s solo exhibition at ShanghART Beijing, she extends her long-standing creative trajectory: depriving the minute, everyday gestures of contemporary people from the context of real life and retelling them through acts of estrangement. Through the visual language of moving image and the theatricality of on-site staging, she reshapes these gestures, manipulating the symbolism embedded within objects to re-contextualize/materialize the seemingly mundane. When entering the exhibition, viewers may feel that everything is both normal and oddly off. That’s because within the fissures of reality, the artist sets conceptual traps, temporarily replacing the original order with her own version of reality. Through “Vera”, both a surrogate of the artist and a projection of the social body, viewers wander between fabricated reality and imagined spaces, connecting their internal psychological imagery with the corners “hijacked” by the artist.

Any fragments of the everyday contains both a surface appearance and its inner associative meanings; reality and fantasy run in parallel without contradiction.

I Ruse: Rationalized Daily Movements

A typical scene in Joyce Ho’s work unfolds in a neutral space, clean and functionally minimal. Within it, Vera performs everyday actions, but in an altered manner. The tightly framed shots generate a slight discomfort, like the sting of a mosquito bite. In the new series Before it Happens, Vera is wiping, applying makeup and ironing in a domestic setting – nothing out of the ordinary. Vera is stripped of distinctive personality, reduced to a functional presence. The artist asked her to concentrate on the mundane rather than the more “productive” behaviors. According to Ho, “I invited the performer, asking her to carry out these daily gestures in slow motion, and after that I sped them up back to normal rhythm.”

But why the slow motion and the speeding up? The technical/artistic choice points to the core of the work: everyday time operates on two scales. We spend each and every day in both “metabolic, natural time” and “social time established after the invention of western clocks”. These two scales are manifest as the “complex” and the “complicated”. The “complicated” everyday is measurable and sequential, like a train timetable; while “complex” everyday is ambiguous, multilayered and full of interactions, like a chance encounter or a conversation at a party.

In contemporary society, the weight of individual life is built upon the infrastructure shaped by rapid technological development and capital concentration. And the “complex” and the “complicated” represent two fundamentally different modes of construction. When the “complicated” is used to simulate the “complex”, it recalls the film The Congress, in which the actors/actresses are digitized, and human emotions as well as facial expressions are reproduced through scanning and motion capture. Lived experience is simulated and transformed into another form of existence.

Back to Joyce Ho’s work, as a projection of the social body, “Vera” reveals how the metrics of social labor/activities inscribe themselves onto individual body. Through the manipulation of time, the artist performs a delicate sleight of hand: while the surface reality seems ordinary, a simulated theater unfolds during rehearsal and filming. The slower Vera moves, the heavier the movements become. Each wiping becomes a small act of resistance, against time and against inertia. The slower Vera moves, the richer the information. Each ironing motion becomes an escape, from quantified time and physical norms. The process of speeding up becomes a momentary standardization, a refined digital mechanism that constructs the “complicated” to catch up with (smooth out) the normal order (and errors). The same approach recurs throughout many works in the exhibition.

II Sight: Shifting Between First and Second Person

Looking from another angle: beyond Vera’s staged movements between the frontstage and backstage, her relationship with the camera is also profoundly performative. Close-up details, mirrored relfections and centrally positioned figures lead viewers to constantly shift between first-person and second-person perspectives. The camera not only captures Vera, but also pulls the viewers into the frame. In the meantime, the reflective surface pushes viewers back out, inviting reciprocal gazes. If Ho is seen as a film director who has stepped off the screen, she not only constructs atmospheric situations but also creates a complex dnamic of mutual gaze between the work and the viewers, redistributing subject position through installation parameters. Manipulating image height, mirror distance and object elevation, she subtly “hacks” the corners of reality, evoking bodily memory and turning the act of viewing into a performative act of response.

Take Before it Happens_Tremble for instance. The video appears within an everyday vanity mirror, simulating a typical distance and line of sight, revealing a scene of “appearance enhancement” - a morning, a desk, a contemporary routine. And in Before it Happens_Snow, the artist deliberately places the camera at the center, dividing the image space into two and interweaving the subjective perspective with that of the character who is engaged in this reciprocal gaze. The grammar and rhetoric of Ho’s moving images function less as narrative windows and more as objects for contemplation and gazing.

Turning to the installation that preserves traces of Vera’s body. When the body disappears, the space is merely a place where events used to happen. The perceptual experience of the viewers transforms from mirrored “viewing of a body” to a “filled-in fist-person bodily sense” – a form of embodiment in which the subject reclaims the space. Here, the artist materializes time, space and movements, not inviting viewers to intrude into her captured images, but guiding them to “enter” that moment through visual and psychological imageries.

With the rectangular frame removed and the presence of the videographer diluted, the performative close-up details make an emphasis on the existence of “experience” and “gesture”. It seems all of a sudden viewers gain a first-person embodied experience, and daily gestures are no longer objects to be captured by the camera, but events to be perceived. This “manual-mode” image-making offers an open entry point, reframing the interplay between unconscious gestures and the surrounding environment. To some extent, this series furthers Ho’s inquiry into “everyday gestures”, shifting focus from “movement” to “behavior” - the mechanism of the everyday that operates spontaneously through the body, beyond knowledge and conscious will.

III The Artist’s Intention

Joyce Ho describes herself as an observer of daily life, attentive to nuanced changes in people’s bodily movements. But to be more precise, I think her concern lies in the expressive forms of life – how everyday gestures generate images and consciousness through visual revelation and conceptual distillation. Her work consistently conducts a “micro-absurd” examination of the everyday: the desires that have been shaped, labor orchestrated, and power naturalized. Also, her work questions the rhythms and perceptual structures of life that are coded, predicable and manageable, including the operations of time, movement and emotion.  

But I don’t see Ho as an artist with the intention to become a social activist. In my eyes, she’s closer to a researcher of contemporary life, concerned with the boundaries of free will, the uncharted space between technological development and human behavior, and the romantic representation and preservation of the disappearing experience. In this exhibition, such reflections recur across varying rhythms: gestures are reenacted, video images echo one other, order and escape intersect, while rhythms oscillate between control and release. I guess the only way to approach the artist’s intention is through the mutual gaze between oneself and Vera. It may be a day-to-day critique on human habits under the technologies and structures of contemporary society; or perhaps, a call to reclaim trueness amid mass reproduction stripped of imagination and aura.

If
Vera symbolizes a threshold between the work and the outside world,
then
what is it that we see
in Vera?