Encompassing video, installation and performance, Ho’s practice is primarily research-oriented; one of his abiding interests is the socio-political history of Southeast Asia. Recently, he has established an umbrella project, The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia, under which he has categorized older works, as well as new ones. Two of the latter are derived from terms in the Dictionary: The Name from “G for Gene Z. Hanrahan” and The Nameless from “L for Lai Teck”. Both works are montages of found footage taken from existing films, and narrate the tales of the aforementioned personages. The Name focuses on the shadowy figure of Hanrahan, the author of The Communist Struggle in Southeast Malaya, a 1954 text that subsequently became one of the most important and influential studies of the Malayan Emergency. In The Name, Ho has used footage from a variety of Anglo-American films to narrate the story of Hanrahan, while accompanying the two-channel video with an installation of 16 books either written by Hanrahan or dealing with the Malayan Communist Party. The Nameless focuses on another shadowy historical figure, the one-time Secretary General of the Malayan Communist Party, who held the position from 1939 to 1947, popularly known as Lai Teck. He was born of Sino-Vietnamese parentage and believed to have been a triple agent. The Nameless narrates the tale of Lai Teck through a montage of footage taken entirely from films starring HK actor Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, reconstructing the tale of this border-crossing shapeshifter, in whose biography is encapsulated a seminal moment in the decolonization of Southeast Asia.
