Ho Rui An: Debut art show disrupts and delights
With sly wit, it explores labour, technology and capital through the lens of contemporary art and AI
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IT IS hard to believe that Ho Rui An has never had a solo exhibition in Singapore before. At 34 years of age, he’s already notched several achievements in the global art space, showing his artworks in notable galleries, museums and biennales. Serious art lovers are genuinely fascinated by his practice, marked by provocative concepts and deep intellectual rigour. He’s held solos in Vancouver (2018), Kuala Lumpur (2020), Vienna (2021) and Bangkok (2022).
But in Singapore? Never – until now.
A+ Works of Art, a Malaysian gallery founded by art lover Joshua Lim, has taken a significant step of organising Ho’s first solo exhibition in Singapore at the expansive Artspace @ Helutrans. Running for an entire month till Aug 11, the show is a rare feat for a privately funded gallery, given the rental costs associated with such a large venue. (Lim jokes he’s had to “cut back on drinking” in order to finance the show.)
Fortunately, Ho’s Singapore debut doesn’t disappoint. He has delivered what is quite simply the best solo show by a young Singapore artist in 2024 so far.
Titled Post-Production Fever, it delves into his long-time interest in how labour, technology and capital intersect within different global governance systems. He does this mostly through the lens of the moving image, taking excerpts from movies, TV news, YouTube videos and other visual content, to reorganise them and address the fraught history of capitalist modernity.
When you enter the exhibition, the first work to greet you is 24 Cinematic Points Of View Of A Factory Gate In China. In cinematic history, the first motion picture ever made was Workers Leaving The Lumiere Factory In Lyon (1895). It is brief 46-second clip showing numerous workers leaving through the gate of the factory of industrialist, engineer and pioneering filmmaker Louis Lumiere.
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Ho recasts this by showing real surveillance footage of factory gates of Chinese companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Contrary to the bustling scene of the Lumiere film, these videos reveal surprisingly few workers leaving the premises. Meanwhile, in an adjacent room, Ho displays archival material gathered from China which depicts Chinese workers looking happy and fulfilled – a stark contrast to the reality captured in the footage.
Elsewhere in the exhibition, Ho explores Singapore’s reputation as a prominent petrochemical hub, a role that starkly contrasts with its vision of being an eco-friendly Garden City. To underline this tension, he presents a large-scale installation of an oil executive’s office filled with lush potted plants. The executive’s desk is lined with comical mementos, including a paperweight featuring a real 1960 image of former Finance Minister Goh Keng Swee cutting down a tree on Pulau Bukom to mark the start of construction of a Shell refinery.
The best work at the exhibition, however, is a two-screen video installation titled Figures Of History And The Grounds Of Intelligence. Here, Ho delivers a recorded lecture on the history of “intelligence” in Singapore, which can be heard over the audio. Simultaneously, the transcript of the lecture is being fed into an Artificial Intelligence software, which generates images in real-time in response to Ho’s words.
Because AI is constantly being trained on new information produced around the world, the images it produces are in a fascinating state of perpetual flux. Meanwhile, on the opposite wall, Ho and his curators Zian Chen and Clara Che Wei Peh have conceived a spectacularly comprehensive timeline of the history of intelligence globally and in Singapore.
Taken all together, Ho’s innovative approach to blending historical facts with contemporary technology challenges the viewer to contemplate the evolving intersections of human cognition, historical narratives, and technological advancements. His inaugural Singapore solo exhibition – so sly, audacious and expansive in scope – only affirms his status as one of Singapore’s most gifted young artists.
The exhibition runs at Artspace@Helutrans from now till Aug 11. Opens daily except Mon and Tue. There will be an exhibition tour and AI workshop on July 28 at 2pm, as well as an artist book talk on Aug 10 at 3pm
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