Ho Tzu Nyen

Ho Tzu Nyen (born 1976) is a Singaporean contemporary artist and filmmaker whose works involve film, video, performance, and immersive multimedia installations.

His work brings together fact and myth to mobilise different understandings of Southeast Asia's history, politics, and religion, often premised upon a complex set of references from art history, to theatre, cinema, and philosophy.

Ho was born in Singapore in 1976.

2 or 3 Tigers was exhibited at SUNSHOWER: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia 1980s to Now Exhibition (2017), the largest exhibition of contemporary Southeast Asian art in Japan to date.

From 1998 to 2001, Ho studied art at the School of Creative Arts, Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, Australia, obtaining his Bachelor of Creative Arts (Dean’s List).

Later from 2003 to 2007, Ho studied at the Southeast Asian Studies Programme at the National University of Singapore, obtaining a Master of Arts (by Research).

Ho currently lives and works in Singapore.

In 2003, at his solo exhibition at The Substation, Singapore, Ho presented Utama—Every Name in History is I.

Interested in establishing a history of contemporary art for Singapore, Ho produced 4x4—Episodes of Singapore Art, a series of four documentaries that was aired on national television in 2005.

Each episode focused on a work of art produced by a Singaporean artist, featuring Cheong Soo Pieng, Cheo Chai-Hiang, Tang Da Wu, and Lim Tzay Chuen.

In 2006, Ho completed Sejarah Singapura, a commission for the National Museum of Singapore that features an immersive, panoramic audiovisual representation of precolonial Singapore.

During the inaugural Singapore Biennale in 2006, Ho was commissioned to create The Bohemian Rhapsody Project, a work composed of audition footage that was shot within the former Supreme Court of Singapore, the site where the biennale was being held.

Ho produced The King Lear Project (2007-08), a four-part theatrical series that staged critical essays about King Lear, rather than Shakespeare’s original version of the play.

Ho has been collected by institutions such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and participated in several international film festivals, such as the 41st Directors' Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival in France (2009) and the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah (2012).

In 2009, Ho completed the feature film, HERE''.

'' Stylistically moving between a documentary format and fictional scenes, the film is set in a mental institution, featuring a protagonist undergoing an experimental “videocure” treatment, a plot inspired by the writings of French theorist Félix Guattari.

With HERE, Ho would participate in numerous international film festivals in 2009, including the 41st Directors' Fortnight at the 62nd Cannes Film Festival in France, the 14th Busan International Film Festival in South Korea, the 26th Warsaw Film Festival in Poland, and the 16th Oldenburg International Film Festival in Germany, among others.

In 2009, Ho would create another film and performance, EARTH, which would be screened as part of the official selection at the 66th Venice International Film Festival, Italy.

The 42-minute film utilises three continuous long takes, featuring 50 filmed actors constantly shifting between conscious and unconscious states, achieved by having the actors deeply absorbed in a complex system of cues during filming.

The projected film would be accompanied by live musicians performing a continuous track in sync to the images, a technically complex task for the musicians.

In 2011, Ho represented Singapore at the 54th Venice Biennale at the Singapore Pavilion, presenting the work The Cloud of Unknowing.

In 2011, Ho represented Singapore at the 54th Venice Biennale at the Singapore Pavilion, presenting the video installation The Cloud of Unknowing, curated by June Yap.

Involving a set of eight vignettes that each centred on a character that stands for the cloud’s representation in historically significant Western and Eastern artworks, the video work was projected within a darkened Hall of the Saints Filippo and Giacomo in the Museum Diocesano di Venezia, on a "floating screen that had a sculptural presence".

The work would circulate as a film in festivals such as the 64th Locarno Festival, Switzerland in 2011, the Sundance Film Festival, Utah, USA in 2012, and the 42nd Rotterdam International Film Festival, the Netherlands.

In 2012, Ho would stage the theatre piece, Song of the Brokenhearted Tiger, at the Esplanade, Singapore, done under the collective 3 Tigers.

Featuring four musicians and a traditional Malay dancer, the performance depicts a narrative of the Malayan tigers that once roamed Singapore, but which became extinct with the coming of the British.

The titular work involved a video installation and twenty portrait paintings that re-examined the 14th-century figure of Sang Nila Utama as the pre-colonial founder of Singapore, in relation to the histories of other regional founders.

Ho would present the project as a lecture in a number of pre-tertiary and tertiary educational institutions in Singapore, which included discussions of the process of making the work, as well as the larger historical contexts in which the origin myths are embedded.

After repeated deliveries, the lecture's scope further expanded, along with the formalisation of its mode of presentation as a scripted performance, and Ho would be invited to present the lecture performance at a number of theatrical events and performing arts festivals, first abroad, then in Singapore.

In 2014, Ho produced a sequel, Ten Thousand Tigers, which would further lead to several video installations, lectures, and texts that further developed his examination of the Malayan tiger and their various manifestations.

CDOSEA serves as the overarching framework for Ho's recent projects, including Ten Thousand Tigers (2014), 2 or 3 Tigers (2016), and One or Several Tigers (2017) which find their place in the dictionary under "T", as well as The Name (2015) and The Nameless (2015), which are listed under "G" for "Gene Z. Hanrahan" and "Ghost".

It would also be staged as a solo show at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain in 2015, and later at the Crow Museum of Asian Art, Texas, USA in 2017.

Such would include 2 or 3 Tigers (2015), presented at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Germany, and its later, expanded version, One or Several Tigers (2017), which incorporates aspects and props of the theatre piece.

In 2017 at the Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong, Ho launched the formal manifestation of The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia (CDOSEA), five years after the project's inception in 2012.

An interactive online platform and algorithmically composed “infinite film”, it plays with the idea of a continuous stream of audiovisual material that is constantly updated by multiple and unknown authors.

Ho has shown internationally at major exhibitions such as the Aichi Triennale, Japan (2019), the Sharjah Biennial 14, United Arab Emirates (2019), and the Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2018).

Ho co-curated the 2019 Asian Art Biennial at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts alongside Taiwanese artist, Hsu Chia-wei.

Ho was featured on the 2019 edition of the ArtReview Power 100 list, which charts the most influential individuals working in contemporary art internationally.

Other CDOSEA projects include R for Resonance (2019), a virtual reality work examining the gong in Southeast Asia, an instrument connecting societies and individuals through ritual music, embodying a sacred cosmology.

Ho's most recent research project is centred around a historical examination of The Kyoto School (Kyōto-gakuha), a group of 20th century Japanese scholars who developed original philosophies by based on the intellectual and spiritual traditions of East Asia.