Ho Tzu Nyen (Chinese: 何子彥; pinyin: Hé Zǐyàn; born 1976) is a Singaporean contemporary artist and filmmaker whose works involve film, video, performance, and immersive multimedia installations.
[4] 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).
[3] 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.
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.
[2] 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.
[2][3][5] 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".
[15] 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.
[16] 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.
[16] 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.
[19] The first work from this project, Hotel Aporia (2020), presented at the Aichi Triennale in 2020, was later curated by Hyunjin Kim in the group show Frequencies of Tradition (2020–21) at the Guangdong Times Museum.
The work depicts the 14th-century figure of Sang Nila Utama, a discoverer of Singapore, with the video weaving together apocryphal relationships with various historical regional leaders examine the legitimacy founding narratives, both assembling and dispelling myth.
Time is collapsed through the deployment of the same actor to play other explorers such as Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama, Zheng He, and Singapore's British coloniser, Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles.
[10] Early in 2007, alongside collaborator Fran Borgia, Ho co-directed the first part of the project, Lear - The Avoidance of Love, named after Stanley Cavell's essay.