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 seven large installations: The Nameless; The Name (2015); One or Several Tigers; The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia (2017); Hotel Aporia (2019); T for Time; and T for Time: Timepieces (2023–ongoing). The show traces Ho’s development as he explores the theme of the tiger and other changing figures that evoke the promise of becoming and metamorphosis as well as the subject 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.

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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. 

The exhibition is a collaboration with the Singapore Art Museum (SAM) in cooperation with the Art Sonje Centre, Seoul; the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, New York; and Mudam, Luxembourg