One-person exhibitions of his work have been held at the Hessel Museum of Art (2024), Art Sonje Center (2024), Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (2024), Singapore Art Museum (2023), Hammer Museum (2022), Toyota Municipal Museum of Art (2021), Crow Museum of Asian Arts (2021), Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media [YCAM] (2021), Edith-Russ-Haus for Media Art (Oldenburg, 2019), Kunstverein in Hamburg (2018), Ming Contemporary Art Museum [McaM] (Shanghai, 2018), Asia Art Archive (2017), Guggenheim Bilbao (2015), Mori Art Museum, (2012), The Substation (Singapore, 2003). He represented the Singapore Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale (2011).
Synchronized 2-channel HD projection, 10-channel sound, automated screen, shadow puppets, show-control system, 33 min 33 sec.
In collaboration with Vindicatrix (vocals and music).
Video still courtesy of the artist and Kiang Malingue.
Ho Tzu Nyen : Phantom Day and Stranger Tales
La Mécanique Générale
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Ho Tzu Nyen is widely considered one of the most innovative artists to emerge internationally in the past 20 years.
His work invokes and unravels a vast range of subjects, from precolonial and colonial myths to modernist narratives and geopolitics, to cinematic representations of a hybridized and unstable present. Ho creates complex and compelling video installations that probe reality, history, and fiction rooted in the culture of Southeast Asia. Phantom Day and Stranger Tales features five immersive multimedia installations spanning two decades, alongside a new commission, Phantoms of Endless Day that draws from an unfinished film—now resequenced, re-constructed, and narrated through Artificial Intelligence processes —to raise the spectre of the last days of the Second World War in his homeland, with Japanese and British soldiers and Communist Guerrilas trapped in the jungle with mystical creatures, including a Shamanesque weretiger. The new commission transforms the various historical research he had undertaken into a dream-like fairy-tale, the centerpiece through which to experience Ho’s distinctive set of visual and aural narratives, and his historical imagination.
Ho Tzu Nyen
Steeped in numerous Eastern and Western cultural references ranging from art history to theatre and from cinema to music to philosophy, Ho Tzu Nyen’s works blend mythical narratives and historical facts to mobilise different understandings of history, its writing and its transmission. The central theme of his œuvre is a long-term investigation of the plurality of cultural identities in Southeast Asia, a region so multifaceted in terms of its languages, religions, cultures and influences that it is impossible to reduce it to a simple geographical area or some fundamental historical base. This observation as to the history of this region of the world is reflected in his pieces which weave together different regimes of knowledge, narratives and representations. From documentary research to fantasy, his work combines archival images, animation and film in installations that are often immersive and theatrical.