Christopher K. Ho’s works often begin when he stumbles upon a moment in history that captures his imagination. Some detail from the past hooks the Hong Kong-born artist’s attention, then next comes rigorous research, followed by a process of formal exploration, that in turn leads to drawings, installations, and sculptures. Past works have been inspired by stories like a singer-turned-Hawaiian nightclub icon (Aloha to the World at the Don Ho Terrace, 2018), Nixon-era Christmas decorations (Triangle, 2019), and a Russian hacker’s breach of a US official’s credit card (3720 324038 71000, 2019). While the art objects that result from Ho’s investigations can sometimes look sleek, his work is never purely formal. It’s always laced with coded critiques and layered meanings.

The story behind his sculptural series Return to Order (2022–2023), presented in Encounters at Art Basel Hong Kong by the homegrown gallery Property Holdings Development Group (PHD Group), originates in a classroom long before the artist was born. In the 1950s, American architect John Hejduk (1929–2000) devised an exercise to teach his students the fundamentals of architectural design. It goes like this: Start with a grid of nine squares, then gradually increase the complexity by modifying, resizing, reshaping, or moving one square at a time. By reducing design to its simplest elements, the exercise strips away constraints like function, physics, and style, in order to encourage a deeper, more intimate exploration of form. In this geometric universe, the grid isn’t a cage but a space for expanded possibility.

Ho – an architect by training – took Hejduk’s method to the computer, where he meticulously plotted, altered, and merged hundreds of digital planes. Once he was satisfied with their forms, the renderings were brought to life through a three-year process of casting, laser cutting, and milling. The result is a suite of 30 brass and aluminum sculptures characterized by their elaborate shapes, intersecting angles, and gleaming, mirror-like shine.

The sculptures are striking. Presented as a group on plinths of varying heights, they look like a visionary’s model for a golden city or the trophy collection of a decorated movie star. Viewed individually, though, the real-world referent of each untitled sculpture is difficult to place. One might glimpse shapes that appear to refer to a familiar building, an elephant ear, a piece of a jigsaw puzzle, or a nautical flag. The Rorschach-like effect becomes increasingly complex as viewers move around them to discover new angles. While their specific shapes remain ambiguous, the overall effect of forms – polished and proud-looking on their plinths – is of Modernist masterpieces destined for museums.

The appearance of historical importance is partly the point. When Return to Order was displayed in Ho’s 2024 solo show at Property Holdings Development Group (PHD Group) in Hong Kong, the exhibition title ‘I Am a 70-Year-Old British Sculptor’ nodded toward the automatic legitimacy granted to an older, Western artist. (Ho has a knack for adopting alter egos, once publishing a book about regional painting under an anagram of his own name.) This clever framing underscores the labor and thought behind Ho’s work while also raising a radical question: Can the formal language of Modernism – so often co-opted by power – still carry subversive potential in the hands of those outside the established canon?