Oxygen Art Centre is delighted to present the exhibition, TRIPLE BURNER FLOWER FIELD by SF Ho, on view from January 15, 2025, to March 8, 2025.

Ho was artist-in-residence at Oxygen through November and December 2024 where they developed new artworks that compose the exhibition and hosted reading group events to explore themes and topics associated with their practice.

An origin point for this body of work is a Chinese pictograph for the word “no”, said to represent a calyx, a root, or a bird flying into the sky. Ho is interested in questioning how the Chinese image of “no” underlies the linguistic, therapeutic, and ecological frameworks that run through Ho’s visual and text-based practices.

TRIPLE BURNER FLOWER FIELD attends to the use of common plants while speaking to first-generation settlers about agriculture and medicine. Ho drew on archival and oral accounts of the role of the barefoot doctor during the Cultural Revolution, the agricultural land defense movement in Hong Kong, and the early Chinese market gardens of Nelson, BC.

By highlighting the spiritual and medicinal uses of four plants: tea, yarrow, poppy and mugwort, the exhibition examines how life is separated into the categories of useful commodities or invasive weeds within the framework of global capitalism.

Using emptiness and manifold duality as guiding principles, art making becomes a kind of serious play that points to interdependence with land and beings while eschewing human supremacy. TRIPLE BURNER FLOWER FIELD includes an installation of ceramics, textiles and scent pieces, as well as a video featuring interviews with Wang Zhao and Ling Yin and an original musical arrangement by the artist.

The exhibition TRIPLE BURNER FLOWER FIELD by SF Ho will be on view at Oxygen Art Centre from January 15, 2025, to March 8, 2025. Free to attend, the centre will be open to the public Wednesdays to Saturdays from 1:00 PM to 5:00 PM during exhibition run.

<3 <3 Special thank you to artist Ayesh Kanani for their inclusion of chai cups, to Serena Tang for Mandarin interpretation, and to Xuan Ye for Mandarin translation.

<3 Thank you to the Yarrow Intergenerational Society for Justice, WePress Community Art Space, Tressa Ford and JP Stienne at the Nelson Museum, Archives and Gallery, MUD Ceramics Studio, Hall Printing, Pauline Butling and Fred Wah, Carol Wallace, Karmelle Spence-Sing, and Greta Hamilton for their support in this project.

image (above): composite image by SF Ho, mashipo community farm doucmentation w/installation documentation, 2025

material components

• Yarrow
• Poppy
• Tea
• Mugwort
• Video (duration: 57:10): features interviews with Wang Zhao and Ling Yin, music and field recordings, plant footage from Ho’s garden and neighbourhood
• Photograph: large wheat pasted image of fire at Ma Shi Po village, from Ho’s visit in 2017, possible arson
• Acupuncture needles stuck into clay on the floor, forming the oracle bone character for 回
• Mugwort/moxa holders fashioned out of clay with acupuncture needle adornment
• Two plaster wall pieces scented with ground Szechuan peppercorn and mugwort
• Cups made by Ayesh Kanani, modelled after cups used to serve chai in South Asia, containing plant materials
• Silk banners hand dyed with tea and yarrow
• Prints from Nelson’s local archive featuring history of market gardens, weighted with railroad spikes from the site where farmers were evicted
• Yarrow stick bundles, similar to those used in I Ching divination
• 3D printed poppy heads juxtaposed with clay pebbles impressed with poppy head motif 
• Two custom perfumes
• Small altar

readings

Pharmacie Gasy: the Neocolonial Instrumentalization of Toxicity to Discredit Healing in Madagascar
by Chanelle Adams
Illustrations by Sarah Boisard
FUNDAMUBLIST (November 3, 2017)
Click here

Below Human: On Porosity and Pervasion
by Xiang Zairong
diaphanes, Human after Man, eds. Susanne Witzgall & Marietta Kesting
Click here

*Reading group events are now complete. Please access these readings for additional exploration on the themes and topics related to Ho’s exhibition.

about

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This program is generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Regional District of Central Kootenay ReDi program.

All images courtesy SF Ho.