Lianne Nerissa Allegra Ho’s artistic practice has been heavily influenced by her multidisciplinary formation in Psychology, Fashion Studies, Architecture and Fine Art. Studies in Psychology cultivated interest in notions of identity, intergroup relations, and the philosophy of cognition. Pursuit of Fashion Studies fostered a curiosity for how social, historical and political forces influence the culture of a time. Time spent in the discipline of Architecture inspired preoccupations with the economic, political and technological networks that shape our world, different modes of representation and their meaning, and experimentation with new technologies. Her training allows her to critically draw connections across disciplines and create in a way that integrates multiple areas of expertise.
The most recent pieces from her oeuvre engage ideas about politics, technology, and the global economic system. Specific topics pertaining to these themes include: (1) the distorted political climate that has resulted from the presence of digital social media platforms and questionable news outlets littered throughout the internet, (2) the pervasiveness of digital technology in contemporary life and its impact on our understanding of pictorial space, and (3) the fictions of the global economic system, such as the speculative, unreal aspects of credit, the stock market, global currency, and commodity obsolescence. Mediums have ranged from video to oil painting to virtual reality drawing to laser holography.
Her recent research concerns developing a landscape painting from a Chinese-Canadian diasporic perspective. This idea arose from her previous body of work Distorted Political Spheres, which explored the distortion of truth in the political sphere as a function of social media platforms. This project explored the meaning of monuments and how they are implicated in developing a national and cultural identity, which led to an interest in how national and cultural identities are constructed and the symbols used to create them. This concern, in conjunction with the artist’s Chinese Canadian identity, was the impetus for her current project, Landscapes through the Diasporic Eye. The project may be particularly of interest to audiences of a plural cultural formation, those subject to the dynamics of globalization today.