Serena Ho May Yin

About

Serena Ho May Yin, 何美賢, alias mySERENA, is an outstanding artist and an author. The mass media described Ho as ‘amazingly talented’ shortly after her official debut. She is known to be intellectually gifted through her natural understanding in visual arts, performing arts, martial arts, music, sports, math and engineering; these combine to enable her to achieve freedom in her creations. Ho currently splits her time between Hong Kong and Japan.

The mass media has described her as ‘a unique female artist rich in emotions as well as logic, combining the two in the most instinctive way’. Her creative journey is, however, unconventional. She was born into a cultured family; her father is an established architect and her mother was a university professor. She started painting on her own at nine years old when her parent separated, immersing herself in a world of colours. Over the years, she furthered her art knowledge by learning different art genres in Hong Kong and Japan. She is also trained in singing, several musical instruments, and pop and classical dance. She is a Taekwondo black belt who plays several sports for which she has received prizes; she once achieved an inter-school record in Hong Kong.

By chance, she became a fashion model in high school and thereafter co-founded a fashion brand in Asia while obtaining a master’s degree in engineering at Stanford University in the U.S. She then respected her family’s wishes by briefly becoming a banker; she worked for European ‘bulge bracket’ banks for a few years so that she could fund her early art productions. All of these experiences have empowered her to gain a better understanding of life that fuels her visions and artistry. Her mother’s sudden passing led her to a deeper spiritual awakening and made her question life: ‘We are all here to experience human life, but how?’ Acutely sensitive to others’ vibrations, she philosophises art in conjunction with the universe and humanity from a modern woman’s perspective.

She had her first major solo art exhibition at Hong Kong City Hall in 2018, reportedly becoming the youngest female artist to have done so. She followed this with a solo exhibition in Chongqing Ecool with China Merchant in 2019. From 2020, she has been invited to group exhibitions in the Netherlands and the U.K., as well as giving solo exhibitions in Japan and Korea. At the same time, she has published four books on her thoughts and poems. Ho artistically celebrates freedom and is adept at incorporating both contemporary and classical elements into her work. The approaches that she explores in her work are culturally unbound, owning to her early exposure to many facets of human experience. In art, she subsequently arrived at unique methods such as using fire and metalsmithing in her paintings. Newspapers have made a point of mentioning that ‘some of the methods used in her work are unusual and original.’