The exhibition Ho Tzu Nyen: Time and the tiger is the first mid-career survey dedicated to the artist Ho Tzu Nyen (b. 1976) and his multifaceted artistic practice. Widely considered one of the most innovative artists to emerge internationally in the past twenty years, Ho creates complex and compelling video installations that probe reality, history, and fiction rooted in the culture of Southeast Asia.

As a visual artist, writer, theatre-maker and filmmaker, Ho Tzu Nyen’s work has continuously challenged conventional hierarchies in our understanding of the past. His immersive multimedia installations draw from historical events, documentary footage, art history, music videos, and mythical stories to investigate the construction of history, the narrative of myths, the passage of time and the plurality of identities.

Time and the tiger charts the development of Ho’s work through the tiger and other shapeshifting figures that proffer the promise of becoming and metamorphoses, and time as an embodied and heterogenous experience. Ho works across a variety of media to critically examine how histories—be they state, cultural, or personal—are continually imagined, negotiated, and performed. Commenting on the cross-culturalism of Southeast Asia, Ho invokes and unravels a vast range of subjects, from pre-colonial and colonial myths, to European Renaissance paintings, to modernist narratives and geopolitics, to cinematic representations of a hybridized and unstable present.