Ho Tzu Nyen mounts 2023’s best art show

HO TZU Nyen, arguably Singapore’s biggest contemporary art export, is having a mid-career survey at Singapore Art Museum (SAM) in Tanjong Pagar Distripark – and the show is quite simply this year’s best art show. 

Sprawled across several rooms and galleries, Time & The Tiger demands more than a cursory glance; it is an immersive experience that challenges the temporal constraints of a mere couple of hours. His most important works are videos of different lengths, playing in a loop, making it hard to catch their start and finish and to savour them in their entirety. Other video works can be watched sporadically, with each discrete section yielding its own meaning. 

Yet, it is worthwhile to set aside time to navigate the show and piece together its fragments – the rewards are considerable.

Since the early 2000s, he has been weaving narratives that straddle the realms of the historical, the mythical and the contemporary. His breakout video work, Utama: Every Name In History Is I (2003), explores the history and myth of Sang Nila Utama. It grapples with the nature of identity, the fluidity of time, and the intersections of history and fiction. Filmmaking and genre-muddling quickly became the cornerstone of his style.

As his career gained momentum, his interests broadened to include the large and complex history of South-east and North-east Asia. His magnum opus, The Critical Dictionary Of South-east Asia, is a labyrinthine video work of “infinite duration”. It borrows hundreds of video images from countless sources to tell the sprawling history of the region from A (“A for Asia, Archipelago, Anarchy…”) to Z (“Z for Zone, Zomia, Zoomorphism...). 

Astonishingly, the work is programmed by a complex algorithm to orchestrate a random sequencing of its images, so that each viewing offers a fresh permutation of the same work. (To get a better idea, view a version of the work online at cdosea.org)  

Other works explore the notion of the tiger in ancient Malay myths and World War II history, the cultural traditions of time-keeping across Asia, and the real-life figure of Lai Teck, a triple agent for the French, British and Japanese secret services during the Malayan Occupation.

The largest-scale work at the exhibition is the stunning Hotel Aporia (2019), an installation housed in multiple Japanese-style rooms off a long corridor. These rooms resemble the ones where kamikaze pilots gathered and dined before their suicide mission against the US Navy fleet at Okinawa in 1945; they are also similar to the spaces where director Yasujiro Ozu shot famous scenes for his films, and where Kyoto School philosophers socialised to formulate original concepts merging Eastern and Western philosophies.

Ho has taken this diverse cast of characters to create several films that parse variegated ideas and images of Japan in such a way that no single monolithic image of Japan prevails. Each film is shown in different rooms, replete with transducers, automated fans and show-control systems for immersive experiences. It was the first edition of this very work shown at the Aichi Triennale in 2019 that so impressed SAM director Eugene Tan, that it inspired him to conceive and curate Ho’s present mid-career survey.

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Reflecting on his inclination to make works with intricate meanings, Ho says: “The single reading of an artwork, in a certain sense, has always been my enemy. Even when I was making a more ‘conventional’ work, so to speak, I’ve always tried to resist that single, authoritative – perhaps even authoritarian – reading or recounting of events or ideas.

“Going into algorithmic systems was a natural progression because of all the possible permutations that can come out of these materials. They invite the audience to continuously produce meaning along with these new configurations. This co-creation between the work and the audiences is, in a sense, what interests me the most… And while I realise this can be a challenge for the audience, I think if they take a little bit of time and thought, they may find that the works can create possible meanings in a cohesive, coherent way.”

After Singapore, Time & The Tiger will travel to Art Sonje Center in Seoul, and Hessel Museum of Art in New York.

Time & The Tiger runs from now till Mar 3, 2024 at Singapore Art Museum in Tanjong Pagar Distripark. Free admission for Singaporeans and permanent residents.