Ji Ho-Ying

Ji Ho-Ying is a painter currently completing his studies at the Glasgow School of Art. His practice centres on materiality, texture, and the ways images come into view, while exploring the intersection of painting and sculpture.

Working from the reverse of the fabric, Ji applies varying amounts of paint to create indentations and nuanced shifts in the plane, texture, and depth. The pigment is forced through the fine gaps between the fibres, producing restrained traces of colours on the surface, while the tension generated as the paint dries causes the canvas to contract, warp, and deform. Through this material process, the image is neither explicitly rendered nor immediately disclosed, but gradually brought into view. From a distance, the works can appear almost blank; as the viewer moves closer, understated images begin to reveal themselves through the textured surface, responding to slight variations in depth and light.Rather than offering an immediate pictorial encounter, the works invite a slower mode of viewing, in which images are discovered through movement and sustained attention.

This restraint in colour does not imply an absence of narrative. On the contrary, Ji’s practice unfolds almost like an ongoing travel diary. Deep blue seas, expansive mountain ranges, and vivid yellow bananas—striking scenes once encountered and experienced firsthand—gradually lose their original intensity through the passage of time and the workings of memory, leaving behind only blurred yet warm fragments. The fading of colour, therefore, is not a diminishing of reality, but a trace of how memory operates: landscapes that are gradually slipping from memory re-emerge in quieter and more subdued forms, giving rise to a visual language imbued with warmth and a subtle sense of joy.

Within this context, Ji’s practice asks a fundamental question: when colour gradually disappears from our everyday lives, what will remain? Ji places remembered environments held in personal memory between presence and disappearance, extending this awareness of loss towards broader contemporary realities. Amid ongoing global conflicts, an escalating climate crisis, and profound social and environmental changes, colours, and everyday experiences once taken for granted may progressively recede from view or disappear altogether.

Ji’s work celebrates the vitality and wonder of life while reflecting on the ongoing losses of the contemporary world.