Time & The Tiger by Ho Tzu Nyen at Hamburger Kunsthalle

The exhibition is the first mid-career show of Ho Tzu Nyen—a visual artist who creates complex and compelling video installations that probe reality, history, and fiction rooted in the culture of Southeast Asia.

Overview

As a visual artist, writer, theatre-maker and filmmaker, Ho Tzu Nyen’s work has continuously challenged conventional hierarchies in our understanding of the past. His immersive multimedia installations draw from historical events, documentary footage, art history, music videos, and mythical stories to investigate the construction of history, the narrative of myths, the passage of time and the plurality of identities.

Time & the Tiger charts the development of Ho’s work through the tiger and other shapeshifting figures that proffer the promise of becoming and metamorphoses, and time as an embodied and heterogenous experience. Ho works across a variety of media to critically examine how histories—be they state, cultural, or personal—are continually imagined, negotiated, and performed. Commenting on the cross-culturalism of Southeast Asia, Ho invokes and unravels a vast range of subjects, from pre-colonial and colonial myths, to European Renaissance paintings, to modernist narratives and geopolitics, to cinematic representations of a hybridized and unstable present.

About The Artist

Ho Tzu Nyen (*1976, in Singapore) lives and works in Singapore. He earned a B.A. in Creative Arts from Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne (2001), and a M.A. in Southeast Asian Studies from the National University of Singapore (2007). Ho exhibited at the Singapore Pavilion at Venice Biennale (2011), had international solo exhibitions, and was part of the Gwangju Biennale (2021) and the 14. Sharjah Biennale (2019). His films were shown in various festivals. He co-curated the 2019 Asian Art Biennale in Taiwan.