It’s not easy to define the artistic endeavors of Fred Ho, the latest artist brought to campus by the UW-Madison Arts Institute. Ho, sponsored by the Asian American Studies department and the School of Music, is a composer, a performer of poetry, a jazz virtuoso on the baritone saxophone, an activist and, for the past two years, a survivor of a particularly malicious cancer.
This fall, the composer of everything from operas to a “martial arts ballet” is teaching more than a dozen UW students some intangible things — how to invent art rooted in their background and beliefs, how to push their minds and bodies to new levels of creativity and how to trust themselves.