Ho Tzu Nyen: Time & the Tiger

In February 2025, Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean will welcome artist Ho Tzu Nyen (1976, Singapore), a major figure in contemporary art whose work pushes the boundaries of moving image. Following an international tour of Asia and the United States, the exhibition Time & the Tiger will offer a journey through the layers of history in East and Southeast Asia.
 
Bringing together five video installations created since 2017 in an immersive setting, the exhibition is centered around the two motifs highlighted in its title. Through these themes, Time & the Tiger will offer a profound meditation on our relationship to history: how it is written, transmitted and shaped by myths and fiction.
 
Time, for Ho Tzu Nyen, is not linear but made up of meanders, loops and whirlpools. He sees it as the very material of his work: “Sometimes I think that the true medium I work with is time itself. After all, one could say that moving images like films and videos are just attempts to give shape to time,” he explains.
 
These reflections are particularly evident in the installation T for Time (2023–ongoing), produced for the exhibition. Combining images drawn from diverse contexts and their adaptation into animated film, the two-channel projection collides different experiences, conceptions and scales of time. It spans everyday stories collected from the artist’s entourage to ideas from philosophy, cosmology and quantum physics, as well as the evolution of time-measuring instruments in Asia and Europe. Programmed using an algorithm that generates a new version of the work each time it is played, T for Time creates random associations between narratives and images, and between various scales of time. 

Central to the exhibition and Ho Tzu Nyen’s practice, the motif of the tiger embodies this conception of history and time. Having roamed the Asian continent for two million years, the tiger was once prevalent in Southeast Asian ancestral cultures but became almost extinct under colonial rule. “In this story, death is not the end. Instead, we see tigers returning again and again in various new forms,” Ho Tzu Nyen observes. 
 
One or Several Tigers (2017) revives the tiger through a two-channel video projection combined with a puppet theatre created in the tradition of Indonesian wayang kulit. The work takes as its starting point a nineteenth-century lithograph depicting Irishman George D. Coleman—a key figure in the construction of colonial-era Singapore—encountering a Malayan tiger in the jungle. On two facing screens, these characters are brought to life through computer-generated imagery and engage in a sung duet. Coleman symbolises rationality, conquest and territorial control, while the tiger embodies the untamed forces of nature, life and ancestral spirits.
 
The exhibition will include a new presentation of Hotel Aporia (2019), Ho’s multi-channel film which explores the influence of Japanese imperialism in Asia during the years surrounding World War II. It will also feature CDOSEA (2017), a video work composed of found images, video clips and texts sourced online, coming together to create a kaleidoscopic portrayal of Southeast Asia—a region defined by its multiplicity of identities, languages, religions, cultures and influences. 
 
With Time & the Tiger, Ho Tzu Nyen immerses visitors in a dense universe where a multitude of images and sounds, myths and narratives, historical threads and geographic trajectories, real and fictional characters, human and animal existences intertwine. Through the lens of Asia, the artist makes palpable the complexity of historical currents, and the social, geopolitical and cultural realities that shape the present, sketching a portrait of a world in constant transformation.
 
Lead curators for the touring exhibition Eugene Tan (Singapore Art Museum) and Sunjung Kim (Art Sonje Center)
Curator for the exhibition at Mudam Luxembourg Christophe Gallois.
 
The exhibition Ho Tzu Nyen: Time & the Tiger is organised by the Singapore Art Museum and the Art Sonje Center in Seoul, in collaboration with the Hessel Museum of Art in Annandale-on-Hudson (New York State), Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean and the Hamburger Kunsthalle.