Ghosts that transcend time

Ho Tzu Nyen is a visual artist, writer, theater director, and filmmaker. In his complex video installations, he reflects on the structures of reality and fiction. His focus is on myths and narratives from Southeast Asia, whose plurality he emphasizes. Especially in Western countries, this region is often perceived as a cultural entity, but this assumption cannot be confirmed in terms of language, religion, or political structures. The main motif of Nyen's artistic work is time, which he perceives not as linear, but as a structure of loops and twists and turns, and which he gives form to in his films. The tiger, almost exterminated by humans, serves as a creature that can transcend time—a reference to ancient traditions in which the tiger plays the role of mediator between humans and animals as well as between the living and the spirits of ancestors. Ho Tzu Nyen: Time & the Tiger will be on display at the Hamburger Kunsthalle from November 21, 2025, to April 12, 2026.

Ho Tzu Nyen (born 1976) lives and works in his native city of Singapore. He completed degrees in Creative Arts at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, and in Southeast Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore. In 2011, he exhibited at the Singapore Pavilion at the Venice Biennale and has had several international solo exhibitions. He was also co-curator of the Asian Art Biennale in Taiwan in 2019.

The exhibition includes his video installations Hotel Aporia (2019) and T for Time (2023-ongoing). The latter was commissioned by the Singapore Art Museum. Hotel Aporia deals with the history of Japan in the 20th century and the radical changes that these decades brought to the country, leaving behind a society marked by contradictions. In T for Time, Nyen traces how humans attempt to unravel the mystery of time: from the establishment of Greenwich Mean Time to traditional methods of timekeeping in Asia and Europe to theories from quantum physics.

The exhibition Ho Tzu Nyen: Time & the Tiger was previously on view at the Singapore Art Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Luxembourg, which organized the show together with the Hamburger Kunsthalle, the Art Sonje Centre Seoul, and the Hessel Museum of Art in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.