by Nadia Egan // Mar. 3, 2025
This article is part of our feature topic Cycles.
Video art can be a tricky medium—it requires an attention span that isn’t always easy to access in art-viewing settings. So when I emerged from Mudam Luxembourg’s underground space, blinking into the sunlight after nearly four hours inside watching Ho Tzu Nyen’s work, even I was surprised. Somehow, Ho’s video works had kept me hooked for that long. Maybe it was the benefit of a good night’s sleep, the sheer luxury of having the exhibition floor almost to myself, or simply the intricate layering of Ho’s work—dense, hypnotic, impossible to absorb in a single pass. Whatever the reason, I was transfixed, only stepping away when I hit the point of cognitive overload.
It’s a good thing I made the call to leave—technically, I could have stayed forever. Much of Ho’s work is driven by an algorithm that loops endlessly, generating a new sequence of images, voiceovers and footage with each cycle. No two visitors will ever see the same combinations—a mind-bending thought, given the sheer volume of material at play in ‘Time & the Tiger.’
Ho Tzu Nyen: ‘T for Time,’ 2023–ongoing // Courtesy of Singapore Art Museum
This is most striking in ‘T for Time’ (2023–ongoing), a two-channel video projection composed of 42 sequences that unfold over 60 minutes. The algorithm scrambles its order with every activation, ensuring the work never plays the same way twice. Instead of a fixed narrative, it assembles a constantly shifting constellation of reflections on time. The only constant is the saxophone melody that drifts through the piece—yet even this resists perfect alignment, always landing just slightly off beat.
Accompanying this, ‘T for Time: Timepieces’ (2023–ongoing) expands the concept across 43 LED screens, each offering a meditation on time’s many forms. These fragments range from symbolic imagery—candles, rivers, still lifes—to timekeeping devices like marine chronometers and atomic clocks, as well as cultural references, from Félix González-Torres’s ‘Perfect Lovers’ to Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho.’ Natural rhythms emerge, too, from the fleeting lifespan of a mayfly to Neptune’s glacial 165.8-year orbit. The result is a sprawling, kaleidoscopic vision of time’s cyclical, fluid nature—layered, poetic, occasionally chaotic.
Ho Tzu Nyen: ‘T for Time: Timepieces,’ 2023–ongoing // Courtesy of Singapore Art Museum
Ho’s algorithmic method resurfaces in ‘CDOSEA’ (2017–ongoing), a perpetually shifting archive of images, videos, texts and audio clips that interrogates the very concept of “Southeast Asia.” Built from ‘The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia,’ a research project Ho began in 2012, the work asks: what holds this region together, if not a shared language, religion or political history?
Like ‘T for Time,’ the work is programmed by an algorithm that endlessly reshuffles its material, forging new relationships between images, voiceovers and historical fragments with every cycle. No two viewings are the same, reinforcing Ho’s assertion that Southeast Asia—both as a region and as an idea—is in constant flux. The premise is conceptually rich, but at times, ‘CDOSEA’ risks feeling like an experiment in accumulation rather than communication. The algorithm’s endless recombinations, while mirroring the instability of history and identity, can also leave the viewer unmoored—cycling through meaning without ever quite landing on a point.
Ho Tzu Nyen: ‘CDOSEA,’ 2017–ongoing // Courtesy of Singapore Art Museum
While ‘CDOSEA’ dissects history through endless recombination, ‘Hotel Aporia’ (2019) approaches the past differently—looping not through an algorithm, but through the re-staging of historical figures and events. Here, Ho moves from an abstract, fragmented archive to a more structured, cinematic meditation on history, this time through the lens of Japan’s wartime past. Philosophers of the Kyoto School, a hotel landlady, kamikaze pilots, their grieving parents, an animator and a filmmaker all intersect within the film’s dialogues. Sitting on woven rattan mats, visitors experience the film from a low vantage point, an intentional framing that recalls the cinematographic perspective of Yasujirō Ozu’s “tatami shot.” The scent of straw lingers in the air, a quiet but effective sensory cue that grounds the films within a specific time and place.
Ho Tzu Nyen: ‘Hotel Aporia,’ 2019 // Courtesy of Singapore Art Museum
Switching between historical record and fictional reconstruction, Ho anonymizes certain figures, obscuring their faces with amorphous digital blurs. This choice—used only in the fictional footage—detaches identity from the individual, allowing characters to function more as archetypes, placeholders onto which viewers can project their own interpretations. The effect is both eerie and evocative, reinforcing the work’s cyclical structure: history does not simply pass but loops, its figures resurfacing but in new forms.
This interplay between erasure and recurrence echoes across Ho’s work. Nowhere is his interest in cycles more vividly realized than in ‘One or Several Tigers’ (2017), where the tiger is both subject and symbol—a spectral presence resurfacing throughout the histories of Southeast Asia. A dual-screen installation blending CGI, filmed footage and traditional wayang kulit shadow puppetry, the work reimagines ‘Interrupted Road Surveying in Singapore’ (c. 1865), a lithograph by German artist Heinrich Leutemann. The original image depicts a Malayan tiger interrupting Irish architect George D. Coleman and his team of Indian convict labourers as they survey the jungle with a theodolite, a tool of colonial measurement and control. But the tiger doesn’t lunge at the men—it strikes the theodolite itself, disrupting the act of mapping, dividing and claiming land.
Ho Tzu Nyen: ‘One or Several Tigers,’ 2017, video still // Courtesy of the artist and Kiang Malingue
In this work, history does not progress in a straight line; it loops, folds and distorts. The colonial-era encounter is revived through digital animation and shadow puppetry, mediums that exist in different historical and technological timelines. The tiger becomes an embodiment of resistance, an ancestral force that refuses erasure. As the piece unfolds, the boundaries between past and present, myth and reality, are destabilized, leaving the viewer suspended in Ho’s hypnotic, recursive vision of history.
Yet for all its conceptual sophistication, ‘Time & the Tiger’ risks feeling like it is running on autopilot. The algorithmic structures that underpin the work, while undeniably clever, sometimes leave the viewer in a holding pattern—circling around meaning rather than breaking through to something more visceral. The refusal of closure, the endless recombinations, the deliberate instability of narrative—all of this aligns with Ho’s broader inquiry into time and history, but at times it feels like a formal exercise, one that doesn’t always deliver an emotional payoff. Watching ‘CDOSEA,’ for instance, I found myself drifting in and out, unsure of whether the work wanted to engage me or simply overwhelm me with its excess.
Ho Tzu Nyen: ‘One or Several Tigers,’ 2017 // Courtesy of Singapore Art Museum
But perhaps that’s precisely the point. Ho’s works do not offer resolution; they demand patience, even surrender. The cycles he constructs do not build toward a single truth but instead remind us that time, like memory, is unstable, recursive and always in flux. ‘Time & the Tiger’ is an exhibition that resists conclusion. It loops, mutates and doubles back on itself, ensuring that even after you leave the show, it continues to unfold in your mind.
Exhibition Info
Mudam Luxembourg
Ho Tzu Nyen: ‘Time & the Tiger’
Exhibition: Feb. 14-Aug. 24, 2025
mudam.com
3 Park Drai Eechelen, 1499 Clausen Luxembourg, click here for map
