Ho Tzu Nyen: Night March of Hundred Monsters

This exhibition is centered on a motif from Japanese folklore: a horde of supernatural, often shapeshifting entities known as yōkai (variously translated as monsters, demons or specters) parading through the darkness of the night. Somewhere between an ordered procession and a state of wild pandemonium, the march of the yōkai may be understood as an eruption of the unconscious into the space of everyday life.

Conflating the form of the parade with that of a moving historical picture scroll, Ho Tzu Nyen enacts a march into Japan’s past. Amongst the hundred or so bizarre and sometimes humorous yōkai, we find a number of historical Japanese individuals who took part in the occupation of the Malayan Peninsula during World War II. They include General Tomoyuki Yamashita, who spearheaded the Japanese invasion of Malaysia and Singapore in 1942, and Yutaka Tani, the Japanese bandit and wartime secret agent who became the model for the extremely popular 1960s TV hero show Kaiketsu Harimau. Both Yamashita and Tani were given the nickname “Tiger of Malaya.” In the march, they find themselves incarnated as weretigers, accompanied by a number of soldiers, spies, and thinkers of the time whose activities remained in the dark. As the title of the famous Francisco Goya etching tells us, the sleep of reason produces monsters. And so the yōkai emerge from the cracks of everyday life and incarnate an era that was fascinated by evil.

As times changed, so did the yōkai. In different historical periods, they fascinated the masses or filled them with fear and curiosity, as they wandered the liminal zones between folklore and science, nature and the supernatural, oblivion and nostalgia. It is sometimes said that the yōkai began to disappear from everyday life when people stopped believing in their existence. But they now roam at will in the imaginary worlds of anime and manga, perhaps awaiting another crack through which they will once again emerge into our world.

With a soundtrack by Aki Onda, featuring Keiji Haino and Phew on vocals.