Ho Tzu Nyen about his exhibition ‘Time & the Tiger’ at Mudam Luxembourg скачать в хорошем качестве

Ho Tzu Nyen about his exhibition ‘Time & the Tiger’ at Mudam Luxembourg

14.02 – 24.08.2025 ‪@mudamlux‬ Ho Tzu Nyen’s ‘Time & the Tiger’ takes us on a journey through the layers of history in East and South-East Asia. A major figure in contemporary art, Ho Tzu Nyen (1976, Singapore) makes films, video installations and virtual reality works that fuse a variety of cultural influences from the East and the West: mythological stories, art history, philosophy, cinema, music, theatre and animated films, as well as images circulating on the internet. At the heart of his artistic practice lies a reflection on history: the way in which it is written and transmitted, but also the role of tales, myths and fiction within it. These questions manifest themselves in works that often take as their starting point the context of Southeast Asia – a region characterised by the multiplicity of identities, languages, religions, cultures and influences and whose ‘unity’, as the artist underlines, appears to lie above all in its plurality and transformation. The exhibition brings together five large-scale installations completed between 2017 and 2023. It revolves around two motifs that Ho Tzu Nyen chose to highlight in its title: time and the tiger. Time, for Ho Tzu Nyen, is not linear but made up of meanders, loops and whirlpools. He sees it as the very material of his work: ‘Sometimes I think that the true medium I work with is time itself. After all, one could say that moving images like films and videos are just attempts to give shape to time,’ he explains. The figure of the tiger, found in Ho Tzu Nyen’s oeuvre since his first works, embodies such a conception of time and history. Present on the Asian continent for two million years, the tiger occupied a central place in ancestral cultures, before being decimated to the point of near extinction. Yet, it continues to nourish imaginaries and play a major cultural and symbolic role. For the artist, it becomes a spectral, liminal figure, capable of traversing space and time: ‘In this story, death is not the end. Instead, we see tigers returning again and again in various new forms,’ he observes. With ‘Time & the Tiger’, Ho Tzu Nyen immerses us in a dense universe where a multitude of images and sounds, myths and narratives, historical threads and geographic trajectories, real and fictional characters, human and animal existences intertwine. ‘Ho Tzu Nyen: Time & the Tiger’ is organised by Singapore Art Museum and Art Sonje Center, Seoul, in collaboration with the Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean and the Hamburger Kunsthalle.