Ho Tzu Nyen: One or Several Works

Chief Curator: Qiu Zhijie
Curator: Fu Liaoliao
Assistant Curator: Richie Chan, Qian Shiyi
Organizer: Ming Contemporary Art Museum
Producer: Li Songjian, Ling Feifei
Supported by: Edouard Malingue Gallery（Hong Kong/Shanghai）

The Ming Contemporary Art Museum is pleased to present One or Several Works, Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen’s first solo exhibition in Mainland China.

Ho Tzu Nyen’s practice ranges across filmmaking, video art, installation, theatre and writing. Taking history and geopolitics as a point of departure, he endeavors to probe into a broader range of issues and to extend the definition of media through constant experiments of image, sound, text, site-specific environments and space.

One or Several Works is specially conceived and curated for McaM. Drawing inspiration from the symmetric and theatrical spatial layout of the museum, the artist presents six recent works and one ongoing project within four installations. Each installation is a theatre in which different works, or different versions of works, take turns to go onstage. Each installation is a performer, playing one or several roles. In this way, the artist explores the possibilities of theatre as media, inviting viewers into these spaces where intensity is continuously generated in real time, creating dynamic relationships between the viewers and the works.

The exhibition unfolds along a timeline woven by the artist, based on The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia (CDOSEA), an ongoing project he initiated in 2011. Presented here as a film algorithmically composed in real-time, the Dictionary tells a story about the region that spans from one million B.C.E to 2045. By blurring the boundary between history and fiction, the artist summons the specters that linger within Southeast Asia: the tiger, the weretiger, the cloud, the ghost-writer, the triple agent, an apocalyptic landscape…quoting and recalling each other. Collectively they form a connected yet paradoxical narrative.

Ho Tzu Nyen’s unique insights into media result in an exhibition characterized by the constant circulation of energies between the inside and outside of works, as well as between the works and the viewer’s bodies. Figures, texts, images, sounds and screens mobilized by the artist intertwine or quiver in unison. Viewers can weave their own paths to constantly experience the spiritual and physical dimensions of one or many works.