Navigating multitudes: An interview with local multi-disciplinary artist Ho Tzu Nyen

This mid-career survey marks an important milestone in your career, how would you describe your evolution as an artist to where you are now?
This show was such a nice occasion for me to gather these works and see how they interact with each other. I was happy not only to see certain characters, motifs, and ideas re-appearing across them but also to feel their resonances. It has become clearer to me over the years that one important component of my practice is in building this world, one in which these characters, motifs, and ideas can live, and thrive, but it took me about 20 years of practice to understand this.

The exhibition is presented as an artistic way of making sense of the world from a Singaporean perspective, can you elaborate on how you achieve that?
I consider a core aspect of my work to be the resistance to reducing things into a single perspective. The single perspective, single account, single understanding, singular version of the truth, and the singular authority, are some of the guises that my enemy takes. I believe that all of my works, especially those present in this exhibition, manifest this loyalty to the multiple and the multitudes, often by multiplying perspectives or even multiplying the versions of the works through algorithmic systems. In any case, if my work is to be read through the notion of a “Singaporean perspective”, then it must be a perspective capable of deconstructing itself, one that contains multitudes and is large enough to embrace contradictions.

‘Aggregation’ was used to describe your artistic process—can you share more on what that term means to you, and if it is an accurate way to describe your method? How would you explain it in layman's terms?
My works grow out of very slow processes of collection: notes, motifs, impressions, and concepts. Then there is also the process of sorting these out, placing them, and relating them. These processes take time, but once they cohere, they can become a generator of worlds. In the arts and humanities, we sometimes tend to avoid, or attack the “aggregational”, and the “statistical”, in favour of notions such as the individual.  But I wonder if there is any way to work with the “aggregational”. I like to deconstruct this binary division between the “aggregational” and the “singular”, and the many and the one.

Adding to that, the phrase ‘algorithmic thinking’ was used to describe The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia (CDOSEA). Was there a specific reason you chose to approach exploring this notion in this fragmented manner?
The work CDOSEA is edited by a set of algorithms.  And what I love about this, is that unlike the cinematic process of reducing all possibilities into a single, linear timeline or perspective, the algorithmic system generates multiple renders, by continuously working through a potentially infinite number of combinations. And what interests me with such systems or modes of thinking is not randomness or chance, but rather combinations that generate new meanings, and new relations. 

Can you tell us more about the fascination with the imagery of the tiger and its presence in your works? How does it represent evolution, transformation, and ambiguity—and provide a geological perspective?
More than a million years ago, when it was still a single landmass, tigers dispersed across Southeast Asia. Then, sea levels rose and broke the Sunda apart, into what we know today as Southeast Asia. In many parts of Southeast Asia, especially the pre-Islamic Malay world, tigers are often regarded as somehow related to the ancestral realm. They are sometimes seen as mediums, or vehicles for ancestral spirits. I would say that they are liminal figures, at the very boundary of what is human, and the outside. However, this entire cosmology, along with tigers, was wiped out in the colonial period. One might consider tigers to have been one of the great victims of European colonisation. But in this story, death is not the end. Instead, we see tigers returning again and again in various new forms.

To tell you the truth, it was not my choice to work with the tiger. Rather, it was the tiger who chose me, to carry out these tasks on its behalf.  All I can do is try my best to serve it as best as I can, but as you can probably guess, the tiger is not an easy mistress. 

Why the interest in exploring myths and the relationship between Asia and the West?
To me, myths are a form of intuitive grasping of the structures of reality. They offer a mode of access to the world, alongside religion, ideology, or science. I suppose that European Enlightenment devalued the mythic, and privileged the “rational”. But the mythic is strangely persistent, it transforms and disguises itself, often to its supposed other. This is how the terrible violence of colonisation could be carried out in the name of enlightenment, progress, and modernity. The West is always already folded into the histories of Asia.   

The theme of time is also prevalent throughout your work, what inspired this exploration, and what led you to the creation of T for Time in particular? Why did you choose to end the exhibition with this work?
Sometimes I think that the true medium that I work with is time itself.  After all, one can say that moving images like films and videos are just attempts to give shape to time. The Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky puts it beautifully—he refers to filmmaking as “sculptures in time”. I suppose I might ask which time? Is there one, or several, or multiple times? Why do certain countries—for example, a place as vast as China, insist on having only one timezone? We might also ask, what is this “time” that we are referring to? Is it clock time? Human time? What about the time of insects like the Mayfly which lives for a proverbial day, or the time of the cosmos?  Does time exist within the universe? Or is time the universe itself? It seems that the only way we can speak about time is through its multitudes of disguises and metaphors. Time is the most elusive of subjects, but it is also intimately connected to the new, to creativity, to the possibility of transformation.

Can you elaborate more on the space between the two screens in T for Time functioning as your subconscious? How does it represent a productive space that only you can enter?
In the last few years, I’ve been drawn to thinking of the image as a composite of different layers in depth. For example, the foreground figure against a background plate. This is of course the structure of cel animation, and this probably explains why most of my works in the last three years took the form of 2D animation. However, what specifically interests me in this strata of images, is precisely the gaps, or the distance between these layers. In a typical animation, these gaps are nullified through the illusion of perspective. This single perspective aligns these layers in such a way that they produce the illusion of a coherent space, which we may also call ideology. Thus, I am interested in finding a way of inserting myself in the spaces between these layers, to not only reveal them, but to activate them, and use them to generate all kinds of new perspectives and movements.

In T for Time, I continue to explore the possibilities of operating in the spaces between these strata, first by splitting the image itself into overlaying screens, and second, by imagining each layer not only spatially, but also temporally, as though the past is a layer always suspended in the present.

I believe these types of in-between spaces are a space of possibility. Without such gaps, for example, our skeletal structures would be immobile. In one of my favourite anecdotes in the Tao Te Ching, the greatest butcher is said to use only a blunt knife, because he has mastered the art of cutting at the joints. So I like to believe anyone—with knives sharp or blunt, will be able to do enter this space, and be productive with it.

The Ho Tzu Nyen: Time & the Tiger exhibition at SAM at Tanjong Pagar Distripark will run till March 3, 2024.

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