ho tzu nyen - 2 stories: voids & times

Das sagt der/die Veranstalter:in:

Ho Tzu Nyen’s first solo exhibition with neugerriemschneider, 2 stories: voids & times, features two recent multisensory spatial installations by the artist in an ensemble building upon his latest wide-ranging institutional exhibitions in Asia and Europe, bringing into focus his extended engagement with legends and fictions, unresolved societal questions and contradictory ideals. Key to this investigation is Ho’s use of video - a medium that he developed an affinity for in the Singapore of his formative years - and his inquisitive expansion of this technique into the fields of its emerging technologies. Here, with a unique pairing of ambitious audiovisual environments, Ho facilitates experiential embodiments of intercultural phenomena and presumed truths as they are unraveled and reconfigured.

Ho leads a practice steeped in and based upon fused histories, including those of fine art, theater, cinema, music and philosophy, creating works that nonhierarchically draw on mythical narratives and verifiable fact in equal measure. New understandings of storytelling, its underpinnings, and of the ways in which anecdotes are written, transmitted and received, come to light as Ho mines the plurality of cultural, linguistic and religious identities of Southeast Asia and the myriad complexities that lie beyond. In filmic ensembles and installations, all of which are as technologically intricate as they are conceptually rigorous, observatory investigation takes physical form, weaving a tapestry of knowledge where documentary meets fantasy, and the archival becomes animated. Ho’s work comes to channel dimensional legacies, giving voice to spirits of resistance and revealing their masked ambiguities.

Voice of Void (2021), Ho’s virtual reality-assisted video projection, transforms two of the exhibition’s spaces into sites of the secretive November 1941 roundtable “The World-Historical Standpoint and Japan,” still controversial to this day for its philosophical reckoning with military action. Conducted by philosophers Keiji Nishitani, Masaaki Kosaka, Iwao Koyama and Shigetaka Suzuki, the conversation attempted to devise a theory of world history against the backdrop of Japan’s involvement in the Second World War. The concepts expressed here grew from the Kyoto School of the early 20th century - a movement that sought to supplant prevailing Eurocentric modes of thought with a philosophy born and cultivated in Asia. The discussions of the past and visions for the future of the symposium at the origin of Ho’s work were often splintered and dissonant, and raised more questions than they answered as the global community spiraled into war. The theories and lives of Ho’s protagonists play out in layered projections showing computer-generated models of science-fiction mecha robots in flight, a prison structure as seen from both inside and in disembodied wide angle, and the roundtable meeting itself. Voiceover provides whispered introductions to the School’s approaches, while virtual-reality headsets, placed at the ready on tatami mats, invite a viewer to enter the work, acting as a participant in various scenes beginning with a tea-room rendezvous, allowing them to shift between characters, scenarios, perspectives, stories and timelines.

This search for multiplicity takes a different form in his 43-channel video installation T for Time: Timepieces (2023 - 2024). Here the historical and geopolitical specificity of Ho’s Voice of Void shifts, widening to collected moments centered upon the notion of time itself. A simultaneous matrix of interactive applications and animated images such as those of an apple being peeled, a calendar seen as it flips, a bomb in the process of neutralization, a burning candle, Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ “Untitled” (Perfect Lovers) (1987 - 1990 and 1991) or soaring arrows illuminate the diverse ways in which a force of nature has been corralled, defined, enumerated and made to a worldview. In this work, time as apprehended under a structured set of criteria is dissolved, its colonial impulses unfolded and analyzed. Across the multiscreen work, individual scenes ranging from seconds to hours or years in length function as their own variably scaled “timepieces” - modules that cast temporality as personal, biological or sociological, setting it within a non-linear narrative. A singularly malleable time takes hold as Ho introduces subjectivities and cultural pluralities, generating visual worlds linked by their concrete visualizations of an immaterial drive, and reshaping the clock’s forward march.

Ho Tzu Nyen (b. 1976) is currently the subject of solo exhibitions at Mudam Luxembourg (until August 24, 2025) and LUMA Arles (until January 11, 2026). In November of this year, this institutional presence continues at Hamburger Kunsthalle with a broad survey of his most central works (November 21, 2025 - April 12, 2026). Ho has been the subject of solo exhibitions at international museums and institutions including Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg (2025); Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson (2024); Art Sonje Center, Seoul (2024); Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Tokyo (2024); Singapore Art Museum, Singapore (2023); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2022); Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, Toyota (2021); Crow Museum of Asian Art of The University of Texas at Dallas, Dallas (2021); Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media, Yamaguchi (2021); Edith-Russ-Haus for Media Art, Oldenburg (2019); Kunstverein in Hamburg, Hamburg (2018); Ming Contemporary Art Museum, Shanghai (2018); Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong (2017); Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Bilbao (2015); Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2012); and The Substation, Singapore (2003). His work has been featured Venice Biennale (2011, Singapore Pavilion). He is currently serving as the Artistic Director of the Gwangju Biennale (2026). Ho lives and works in Singapore.

For further information, please contact: mail@neugerriemschneider.com.