Ho Tzu Nyen

Based on a story by the 19th century Greek writer Lafcadio Hearn, who settled in Japan as Koizumi Yakumo, this film is a parable about how man is a creature that perpetually cannot see beyond his own reflection.

Seven young directors from Singapore produce a cinematic cadavre exquis.

We see the site of an unknown disaster, the debris of history that constitutes the story of Earth. Upon the site, lay fifty 50 humans oscillating between consciousness and unconsciousness, life and death. Sometimes, one of them emerges into the foreground - clutching a fist, batting an eyelid, or weeping for his neighbor. At other times, these figures recede from the light, losing their individual shapes to form a gigantic organism, breathing in unison, pulsating like a jellyfish, though their journey across Earth. (Ho Tzu Nyen)

A television switches on. A mind snaps. A man discovers his murdered wife. As he stares at her lifeless body, the events leading to her death play before him, like in a movie. HERE follows the journey of He Zhiyuan, a middle-aged man who struggles to make sense of his reality. Reeling from the sudden death of his wife, he loses the will to speak and is interned at Island Hospital. There, he meets strident kleptomaniac Beatrice with whom he forms an inexplicable bond. As He adjusts to life within, he is selected for an experimental treatment, which forces him to confront the devastating truth behind his past, present, and future. Meanwhile, a filmmaker visits Island Hospital to document the lives of the staff and patients.

Ho Tzu Nyen's Hotel Aporia features a cast of historical figures from Japan's interwar period, including World War Two kamikaze pilots, philosophers of the Kyoto School, filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu, and animator Ryuichi Yokoyama. They were all caught up in the heady mix of Japan's militant nationalism, anti-modernism, and cultural propaganda. Letters and correspondence between the artist and his Japanese collaborators, the writers Tomoyuki Arai and Yoko Nose, form the narrative basis of the work. Experimenting with the epistemological and affective capacities of animation, Ho superimposes animation images of featureless faces onto found footage clips from Ozu's fiction films and Ryuichi Yokoyama's animation propaganda films. This is a single-screen cinematic presentation of Hotel Aporia. Its original form, first presented at the Aichi Trienanle, is a video installation projecting layers of animation and hybrid-animation images onto multiple screens within a heritage building.

A printer prints nothing.

Waiting features Ripon Chowdhury, one of some 323,000 migrant workers living in dormitories amongst the city state of Singapore, where the overwhelming majority of Singapore’s more than 50,000 COVID-19 infection cases take place. Since 21 April 2020, the government has imposed strict lockdown measures upon all dormitories, and the migrant workers—mostly hailing from South Asia or China—have been largely confined to their rooms. It is in this context that Ripon Chowdhury was invited by artist Ho Tzu Nyen to contribute to Contactless Deliveries. A poet, writer, and activist from Chittagong, Bangladesh, Chowdhury has been based in Singapore since 2010 as a migrant worker.

Experimental short.

No description available.

No description available.

Short political musical

Documentary about art and culture in Singapore in four chapters.

Essay film about mythology and the history of Singapore.

What constitutes the unity of Southeast Asia—a region never unified by language, religion or political power? With The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia—a collaborative platform that facilitates ongoing research, a matrix for generating future projects, and an oracular montage machine—Ho Tzu Nyen proposes 26 terms (one for each letter of the latin alphabet) that question, problematise, and address the complex definition of the territories under this nomenclature.

​The 49th Hexagram explores the construction of cultural memory and political narrative surrounding the history of the Korean peninsula. Employing the services of an animation studio in Pyongyang, North Korea, Ho Tzu Nyen’s work reinterprets scenes of political uprising and mass demonstration as depicted in South Korean narrative film and television. The project aims to form a direct relationship between South Korea’s political history and the tensions that still define the country’s relationship with its northern counterpart. The result is, in the artist’s words, a “game of exquisite corpse across geopolitical barriers.” The artist developed the experimental soundtrack in collaboration with Korean artists and musicians Bek Hyunjin, Park Minhee, and Ryu Hankil. Offering two vocal renditions of texts from the forty-ninth hexagram of the I-Ching, an ancient Chinese divination manual, the soundtrack composites historical interpretation with translation to speak of revolution and renewal.

The Nameless revolves around the story of a man named Lai Teck, one of the 50 known aliases of the Secretary-General of the Malayan Communist party from 1939 to 1949. Lai Teck's real name and background have never been confirmed, but evidence suggests that he was born in Vietnam to a Chinese mother and served as a spy to both the French and British. Piecing together found footage from several Hong Kong films starring actor Tony Leung Chiu-wai, The Nameless acts as a fragmentary portrait of Lai Teck, the film star's likeness standing in for the ambiguous political figure. Ominous and shadowy, the film features Leung (as Lai) in times of distress and introspection, interspersed with repeated motifs of smoke, water, torture and death.

The boundary between viewer and art dissolves in Ho Tzu Nyen’s sublime work, The Cloud of Unknowing. Step inside and find a comfortable space in the room. On a screen, a narrative unfolds, set in a public housing complex in Singapore, where eight characters in eight apartments individually encounter a cloud, embodied both as a figure and a vaporous mist. The film is rear-projected and looped, integrating a complex soundtrack and synchronized steam machines to create a seamless and sublimely atmospheric sense of film/audience permeability. (Sundance Film Festival)

As part of the filmmaker's metaproject The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia, the film takes the letter 'O' to poetically conflate 'Opium' and 'Ocean'. It revisits the opium trade that underpinned British colonial expansion, contending with how opium may be understood, perceived and represented. Found footage and layered voices link Singapore's port history to narcotic economies.

Shown at the Sunshower contemporary art exhibition. 2 or 3 Tigers is a group exhibition about colonialism, media and modernity, specifically in East Asia. The figure of the tiger itself is the medium through which mythological, colonial and modern histories are evoked and folded into the present, highlighting unstable identities and shifting ground, as well as structural continuities and modernization ideologies. Modernity is reflected as a colonial pattern inscribed in the history of nation states, militarization and financialization, but also as a an ontological revolution, as an order that fundamentally upsets social organization, cultural patterns and indeed cosmologies, and that in most societies in the past 200 years has led to a profound crisis of consciousness.