Singapore
Ho Tzu Nyen’s recent exhibition “Time & the Tiger” foregrounded the slippery relation between sculpture and film—two seemingly contradictory media—playing up cinematic form with a sculptural attention to the means of presentation. Addressing recurring themes such as animation, death, sexuality, the Pygmalion effect, petrification, and the uncanny, the show offered a snapshot of Ho’s 20-year career with seven films, two lenticular light boxes, and a multimedia installation. The exhibition layout, which eschewed strict chronological order, spoke to Ho’s persistent engagement with myths, particularly those relating to the symbol of the tiger, and the insights they offer into history, colonialism, evolution, and memory in the Asian world.
Ho’s earlier films, such as The Name (2015–17) and The Nameless (2015), draw on the tradition of the tableau vivant, or “living picture,” a performance practice with origins in early modern drama and festivities in which people assume the attitudes and positions of painted scenes or sculptures. In The Name, excerpts from various books, including The Communist Struggle in Malaya by the mysterious, possibly pseudonymous author Gene Z. Hanrahan, appear alongside a cast of real and imagined writers (in found footage) who resemble statues staring motionlessly at their typewriters; in contrast, the almost animated machines possess a haunting, lifelike quality that evokes feelings of anxiety and loneliness.
The Nameless examines the mythology of the perfect spy through the person of Lai Teck, a Sino-Vietnamese triple agent for the French, British, and Japanese secret services during the Malayan Occupation. The tableau in this case is enacted, in repurposed footage, by the legendary Tong Leung, best remembered for his alluring character in In The Mood for Love. As a novelty and spectacle, Leung creates vivid poses, whether lighting a cigarette and smoking or donning a Mao suit with slicked-back hair and brooding looks. The moody settings (including a dark alleyway and smoky Chinese dance hall), the stage lighting, and the suspense created by the opening curtain focus the viewer’s attention and captivate the gaze.
A series of pavilions outfitted with tatami mats and shoji screens separated these two films from the other works. Hotel Aporia (2019), a creative expression of Ho’s historical and social imaginings of the Pacific War, explores the “hyperreality” of everyday life in 1940s Japan through a cast of historical figures, including World War II kamikaze pilots, philosophers of the Kyoto School, filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu, and animator Ryuichi Yokohama. The multi-channel video installation fragments, re-composes, and rhythmically repeats scenes, conversations, details, and landscape views. This formalist experiment also includes geometric shots of a quaint, typical 1940s Japanese inn that explore its ornamental woodwork, thatched roofs, screens, paintings, and antique lamps.
Two additional “sculptural” works, T for Time and T for Time: Timepieces (both commissioned by SAM), explore various timekeeping traditions and emblems of time. On the latter’s 38 flatscreens, individual video loops feature the repeated performance of certain actions that act as metaphors of sculptural processes—hands kneading dough, peeling apples, assembling a stopwatch, defusing a bomb—and motifs that symbolize methods of recording and conceptualizing time—a burning candle, figures depicted as partial skeletons, arrows, a vase, a gong, and a pendulum.
Watching Ho’s cinema is not unlike dreaming. In The Cloud of Unknowing (2011), we are mesmerized by the appearance of, and our immersion in, a mysterious cloud, which expresses a sense of poverty and anger, of loss and desertion, as it permeates the isolated apartments of individuals living in a public housing block in Singapore. By reducing human elements to freeze-frames, Ho catches everything in surreal, contrasting rhythms—from the heavy breathing of a plump man in bed to a sumo wrestler bathing in slow motion, to a stoic drummer performing in a bizarre house of rain.
The freeze-frame may, like slow motion, be mostly about form, but it also reveals cinema’s correlation to still photography and sculpture. In The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia: Square Stack (Faces) and Square Stack (Landscapes) (both 2019), one could describe Ho’s approach as oscillating between movement and stillness. These three-dimensional LED light boxes, each consisting of 26 images overlaid on top of one another to create lenticular prints, are mobilized through the movement of people walking past them.
“Time & the Tiger” succeeded in bringing out tensions between spectator and statue across genres, emphasizing the corporeal, picturesque, and at times uncanny, nature of these figures. Its presentation of Ho’s work beautifully demonstrates how film and sculpture can work in dialogue, with filmic representation enlarging our understanding of sculptural space (a theme explored in Jon Wood and Ian Christie’s 2023 book Sculpture and Film). As the show travels to various international venues—it is currently on view at the Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, through December 1—recognition of Ho’s work will surely grow as more people have the chance to enter his world.
