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Ho Tzu Nyen’s Time & the Tiger takes us on a journey through the layers of history in East and South-East Asia.
A major figure in contemporary art, Ho Tzu Nyen (1976, Singapore) makes films, video installations and virtual reality works that fuse a variety of cultural influences from the East and the West: mythological stories, art history, philosophy, cinema, music, theatre and animated films, as well as images circulating on the internet. At the heart of his artistic practice lies a reflection on history: the way in which it is written and transmitted, but also the role of tales, myths and fiction within it. These questions manifest themselves in works that often take as their starting point the context of Southeast Asia – a region characterised by the multiplicity of identities, languages, religions, cultures and influences and whose ‘unity’, as the artist underlines, appears to lie above all in its plurality and transformation.
The exhibition brings together five large-scale installations completed between 2017 and 2023. It revolves around two motifs that Ho Tzu Nyen chose to highlight in its title: time and the tiger.
Time, for Ho Tzu Nyen, is not linear but made up of meanders, loops and whirlpools. He sees it as the very material of his work: ‘Sometimes I think that the true medium I work with is time itself. After all, one could say that moving images like films and videos are just attempts to give shape to time,’ he explains.
The figure of the tiger, found in Ho Tzu Nyen’s oeuvre since his first works, embodies such a conception of time and history. Present on the Asian continent for two million years, the tiger occupied a central place in ancestral cultures, before being decimated to the point of near extinction. Yet, it continues to nourish imaginaries and play a major cultural and symbolic role. For the artist, it becomes a spectral, liminal figure, capable of traversing space and time: ‘In this story, death is not the end. Instead, we see tigers returning again and again in various new forms,’ he observes.
With Time & the Tiger, Ho Tzu Nyen immerses us in a dense universe where a multitude of images and sounds, myths and narratives, historical threads and geographic trajectories, real and fictional characters, human and animal existences intertwine.
Biography
Ho Tzu Nyen (1976, Singapore) has presented solo exhibitions in institutions such as the MOT, Tokyo; the Artsonje Center, Seoul; the Hessel Museum, Annandale-on-Hudson (2024); the Singapore Art Museum (2023); the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2022); the Toyota Municipal Museum of Art (2021); the Kunstverein in Hamburg (2017) and the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao (2015). In 2011, he represented Singapore at the 54th Venice Biennale. He participated in the Whitney Biennial 2024; the 13th Gwangju Biennale (2021) and the 14th Sharjah Biennal (2019). His films and performances have been shown in festivals such as Theater der Welt, Frankfurt (2023); the Theaterfestival Basel (2020); the Holland Festival, Amsterdam (2018); the Sundance Film Festival (2012); the 64th Locarno International Film Festival (2011) and the 62nd Cannes Film Festival (2009). His works are held in the collections of the Tate Modern, London; the M+, Hong Kong; the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo and the Singapore Art Museum, among other institutions. Ho Tzu Nyen lives and works in Singapore.