On the back wall of the gallery were two pencil, ink, and gouache works on paper (both 2019) inspired by and named after Sufjan Stevens’s songs: Mystery of Love, depicting a landscape of ruins, scattered with broken sculptural fragments of Hamadan Stone Lion, rumored to be built by Alexander the Great in the memory of his general Hephaestion; and Death with Dignity, showing a naked, ghostly woman trespassing the body of a standing man. While the melody and the lyrics evoke feelings of melancholy and loss, these gray scale works embody a sense of desolation and emptiness. The musical sheets under the illustrations, silent and still on paper, document acts of mourning for either the death of Stevens’s mother or of Hephaestion, whose passing brought an end to his alleged romance with Alexander. Enticed by these tracks, Ho’s translation of the music reflects not only her indulgence in the pieces, but also her process of encrypting these intangible emotions.

In the center of the room, two carpets with geometrical patterns spread out on the ground, titled 1001 Nights After and 1001 Nights Before (both 2019). Ho replicated the carpets after the props used in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s films, including Salò (1975), set during the Republic of Salò. In the provocative movie, more than a dozen teenagers were subjected to torture for the enjoyment of their captors, and forced to perform sexual acts on these carpets. Piercing eyes of four of these fictional dictators from the film, along with seven others of real political leaders, were staring out of vintage frames arranged in an ascending manner on the adjacent gallery wall. Starting with the worried eyes of Chris Patten, the last governor of British Hong Kong, the lineup also included the Soviet Union’s Mikhail Gorbachev, with his recognizable birthmark, and Egon Krenz of East Germany, whose stare gave me chills. The title of this series, Over (2019), not only implies the subjects’ powerful positions above ordinary citizens, but also highlights the end of their individual reigns and that of their political states. While Ho’s meticulously detailed carpets reflect the brutalities of fascism, the portraits of the fictional characters and historical figures, blurring the line between fantasy and reality, spoke of their faded authoritative powers.