One or Several Tigers (2017) is a video installation that traces the figure of the tiger as it appears across the different histories and mythologies of Southeast Asia: from the tiger that allegedly interrupted Government-Superintendent G. D. Coleman’s road survey in the jungles of Singapore to the weretigers in the Malay world who inhabit the space between human and animal, between the present and the past. This work centres on a strange hypnotic duet between G. D. Coleman and a tiger. At points, it becomes unclear just who is singing which line, as the identities of the two seem to merge. This ambiguity and transformation represents, for Ho, the possibility of our becoming something else, outside of ourselves. Tigers, and weretigers, represent at once Southeast Asia’s cosmologies and ways of knowing, but also they are shapeshifters who populate Ho Tzu Nyen’s body of work.

Artwork details
Video, smoke machine, automated screen, show control system, 14 wayang kulit puppets in aluminium frames
Video: two-channel HD video projections, 16:9 format, colour and 10-channel sound, 33 min 33 sec

Hotel Aporia (2019) is a video installation that features multiple rooms, each replete with video projections, shoji screens and tatami mats, simulating the interiors of a Japanese-style inn. The work features a cast of historical figures from Japan’s interwar period including World War Two kamikaze pilots, philosophers of the Kyoto School, filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu, and animator Ryuichi Yokoyama all of whom were caught up in the heady mix of Japan’s militant nationalism, anti-modernism and cultural propaganda. Letters and correspondence between the artist and his Japanese collaborators, the writers Tomoyuki Arai and Yoko Nose, form the narrative basis of Hotel Aporia, while the installation draws on the aesthetics of Japanese architecture and Ozu’s cinematography. As the audience moves through the various rooms, contradictions between the beliefs and actions of the aforementioned characters come to the surface, so much so that it becomes impossible to agree upon the “Japan” that is referred to and idealised by some of these characters.

Artwork details
Video, automated fan, transducers, show control system
Video: six-channel projection, 4:3 format, colour and 24-channel sound, 84 min 1 sec
The Waves: 12 min; The Wind: 24 min; The Children: 24 min; The Void 24 min 1 sec

T for Time (2023) is a two-channel video installation that features anecdotal stories about time, memories and time-keeping traditions across Asia. The work is programmed to randomly re-sequence itself over its defined duration of 60 minutes, such that new configurations and permutations are created with each repeated play. Time is explored here across its various scales: from an atomic level of precision to the everyday and subjective sensation of time passing. By combining and contrasting these different scales and experiences of time, T for Time approximates the plasticity and heterogeneous experiences of time. It is accompanied by another component—Timepieces (2023)—which features multiple video screens, each representing a particular motif and sensation of time passing.

Artwork details (T for Time)
Video, voile screen, scrim walls, real-time algorithmic editing and compositing system 
Video: two-channel synchronised HD video, 16:9 format, colour, and eight-channel sound, 60 min 

Artwork details (T for Time: Timepieces)
Video, app, 39 flatscreens 
Video: 39-channel video work, various formats, colour, various durations 

The Cloud of Unknowing references the title of a 14th-century medieval Christian treatise on contemplative faith, in which the “cloud of unknowing” is used to describe the encounter with an abstract and transcendent divine. Shot entirely within a public housing block in Singapore days before its scheduled demolition, the video features a cast of eight characters set across different apartments. The individuals live hermetically in their apartment space until the appearance of a permeating and mysterious cloud connect their seemingly disjointed lives. 

Each of the eight scenes draw upon shifting representations of the cloud across Western and Eastern art history, literature, and philosophy as symbols of transcendence, transience and hallucination. The cloud can be regarded as one of the earliest shapeshifting motifs that appear throughout Ho’s body of work. The cloud’s amorphous nature and its constant change also reflects, for Ho, the always contingent knowledge of the world. Not unlike the moving images of this installation, every picturing of the world is almost always just a freeze-frame, on the brink of changing.

Artwork details
Video, smoke machine, lights, show control system
Video: single-channel HD projection, 16:9 format, colour, and 13-channel sound, 28 min 

The Name (2015-2017) is a video installation constructed out of found footage from various western films showing actors engaged in the act of writing. The installation also features books “written” by Gene Z. Hanrahan (an alleged pseudonym). While some have long suspected Hanrahan to be a cover for a secret organisation with links to the CIA during the Cold War, The Name is less an exposé on Hanrahan than a meditation on the heterogeneity of names, origins, and the act of (ghost)writing itself. Chief amongst the books displayed is an early historical account of the Malaysian Communist Party, with access to secret documents that suggests Hanrahan’s insider knowledge. 

Artwork details
Video, 16 books 
Video: single-channel HD projection, 16:9 format, colour, and six-channel sound, 16 min 51 sec (English); 16 min 52 sec (Chinese)

The Nameless (2015) is a video installation that revolves around a Sino-Vietnamese man named Lai Teck, a triple agent for the French, British and Japanese secret services during the years of the Malayan Occupation (1941–1945). Lai Teck was also known by various other names such as “Truong Phuoc Dat,” “Lighter” and “Mr. Wright.” The Nameless takes repurposed images of the iconic actor Tony Leung, known for his performances in various Hong Kong films in multiple languages spanning 1989 to 2013. This amalgamation serves as a cipher, ingeniously representing the enigmatic “Lai Teck.” The Nameless attempts to represent this multi-faceted figure as one who not only influenced a crucial period of Malayan history, but also one who embodies the intricate web of historical and ideological complexities of Southeast Asia. 

Artwork details
Video
Video: synchronised double-channel HD projections, 16:9 format, colour, and twelve-channel sound, 21 min 15 sec 

CDOSEA (named after The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia) consists of existing images, video clips and animations that the artist appropriated and then overlaid with a hypnotic voiceover that recites different stories and histories of Southeast Asia. The work is programmed by an algorithm that randomly sequences its video files, thereby creating permutations of the work that are always different and new. An earlier version of CDOSEA is presented openly on the Internet. This exhibition features CDOSEA also takes the form of a video installation, with a projection screen outfitted with LED lights that are programmed to glitch the work’s appearance. This dynamic and ever-changing nature of the work reflects the climatic conditions of Southeast Asia as a region marked by geopolitical turbulence and tropical entropy.

Artwork details
Video, mini PC, algorithmic editing system, LED lights 
Video: single-channel projection, 16:9 format, colour, five-channel sound, infinite duration 

Each of these lightboxes comprises 26 images overlaid on top of one another through the technique of lenticular prints. At first glance, these images appear to be flattened onto a single surface. However, as the audience move past the lightboxes, the seemingly static images unfold and reveal themselves as a moving image, representing their respective themes. As physical condensations of Ho Tzu Nyen’s video and database The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia (CDOSEA), these lenticular lightboxes continue the artist’s central inquiry: what is Southeast Asia—a region that was never unified by language, religion or political power? But rather than seek an answer within the academic discipline of area studies, Ho shifts the question into the realm of formal aesthetics, to consider the region as an open composition and as conceptually plastic work of art.  

Artwork details (CDOSEA: Square Stacks (Faces))
Lenticular print, LED light box, metal frame

Artwork details (CDOSEA: Square Stacks (Landscapes))
Lenticular print, LED light box, metal frame

F for Fold (2021) is an abridged dictionary of 26 terms drawn from Ho Tzu Nyen’s meta-project The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia (2012–). Designed as an accordion book, the work unfolds into various sculptural forms, reflecting Ho’s aesthetic inquiry into Southeast Asia as an open form. While its title is a direct reference to the accordion folds of the book, it is also a term in itself within the database of Ho’s The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia. In thinking about folds, the artist is drawn particularly to the topological thinking of philosopher Michel Serres, where two seemingly unconnected things might be “folded” together to reveal new connections. Folding and unfolding the book thus allows the artist not only the chance to present new sculptural permutations, but also to allow seemingly unconnected terms to touch one another and to produce new connections—not unlike the power of editing, as seen in the randomised sequencing of the video work CDOSEA (2017).  

Artwork details
Colour print on paper

4x4—Episodes of Singapore Art (2005) is an attempt to re-present four works of art by four Singaporean artists, done through three different platforms: a forum discussion; a foldable postcard cube for distribution; and a television series, which was aired on Singapore’s Arts Central channel. This project grew out of the artist’s desire to address two cultural deficits in Singapore: the missing public of visual arts; and the absence of historical memory. The television series straddles video art, mass media intervention, cultural sleuthing, polemics and pedagogy. Set as dialectic arguments between a man and a woman, the programme attempts to popularise techniques of visual analysis and art historical interpretation. 

Artwork details
Video, set of four.
Video: Single-channel HD, colour, sound. Episode 1 Cheong Soo Pieng: 23 min 8 sec. Episode 2 Cheo Chai Hiang: 22 min 22 sec. Episode 3 Tang Da Wu: 22 min 43 sec. Episode 4 Lim Tzay Chuen: 22 min 40 sec.