HO TZU NYEN

The solo exhibition HO TZU NYEN: Time & the Tiger at the Hamburger Kunsthalle is dedicated to one of today’s most innovative international artists, surveying his multifaceted work of the last two decades. The Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen (b. 1976) produces complex video works and immersive multimedia installations rooted in Southeast Asian culture, drawing on historical events, documentary footage, art history, music videos and mythical tales. Time & the Tiger presents five large installations. The two-channel projection T for Time (2023–present) and the series of 43 videos T for Time: Timepieces (2023–present), both created especially for the exhibition, delve into the concept of time. In Hotel Aporia (2019), a polyphony of stories is contrasted with the influence of Japanese imperialism in Asia during the Second World War. One or Several Tigers (2017) looks at the figure and manifestation of the tiger in Southeast Asian mythologies and the role it plays in narratives about the founding of Singapore during the colonial period. Finally, in CDOSEA (The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia) (2017–present), myriad images, video clips and texts taken from the internet merge to create a kaleidoscopic portrait of Southeast Asia. The works on view trace Ho’s artistic development as he explores the tiger and other changing figures that evoke the promise of becoming and metamorphosis brought by the flow of time as an embodied and heterogeneous experience.

Ho Tzu Nyen critically examines in his works how histories – whether state, cultural or personal – are continually imagined, negotiated and performed. In the process, he calls into question conventional hierarchies in our understanding of the past, investigating the effects of the passage of time and the diversity of identities. The artist comments on the cross-culturalism of Southeast Asia by invoking and unravelling a variety of themes ranging from pre-colonial and colonial myths to modernist narratives and geopolitics.

Ho Tzu Nyen (b. 1976 in Singapore) lives and works in Singapore. He studied art in Australia and earned an MA in Southeast Asia Studies at the National University of Singapore. He has exhibited in the Singapore Pavilion at the Biennale di Venezia (2011), had international solo exhibitions, and shown his work at the Gwangju Biennale (2021), the 14th Sharjah Biennial (2019) and many important film festivals. He co-curated the Asian Art Biennale in Taiwan in 2019 and has been named artistic director of the 16th Gwangju Biennale, opening in September 2026.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication (Singapore Art Museum, 2025 / 208 pages) with a selection of Ho’s writings from various phases of his practice along with essays contributed by curators and artistic accomplices who have encountered Ho’s work in various contexts. The catalogue is available in the museum shop for 30 euros.

The exhibition is presented by the Singapore Art Museum and the Art Sonje Center, Seoul, in collaboration with the Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, the Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, and the Hamburger Kunsthalle.