Ho Tzu Nyen is a Singaporean artist, filmmaker and director, recognized as one of the most innovative artists to emerge on the international scene in the last twenty years.
Rooted in the historical and cultural contexts of East and Southeast Asia, he creates captivating video installations that mobilize a wide range of techniques to explore and blur the boundaries between reality and myth, history and fiction. Jour spectral et contes étranges brings together five multimedia installations spanning more than a decade of creation.
From the use of camera and lens and the integration of visual archives, to the use of animation, algorithmic editing systems and artificial intelligence (AI) processes, Ho Tzu Nyen’s technological experiments serve a critical reflection on how histories – state, cultural or personal – are endlessly imagined, constructed, negotiated and performed. Drawing on the heterogeneity of Southeast Asian cultures, his works summon and deploy subjects ranging from pre-colonial myths to episodes of colonization, from contemporary geopolitical dynamics to representations of a hybrid and unstable present. Ho is a storyteller, constantly reshaping both his narratives and the means of telling them. This is why themes, motifs and characters migrate from one work to the next, forming a dense, often hallucinatory universe. A sketch of this universe can be glimpsed in the diagram on the left: it’s the original script for Ten Thousand Tigers, a play he wrote and directed in 2014, and which continues to influence his most recent works.
At the heart of the exhibition is Ho’s latest work, Phantoms of Endless Day, an installation commissioned for the show by LUMA Arles. This project draws on material from Endless Day, a feature-length film begun in 2011 but left unfinished, whose themes and characters have nonetheless haunted his videos and films over the following decade. Using a set of artificial intelligence processes that edit, sequence and recreate images and sounds from the original materials, Phantoms of Endless Day plunges us into a succession of alternative timelines, blurring the boundaries between myth, memory, history and fantasy. True to Ho’s interdisciplinary approach, the installation challenges our understanding of time, perception and narrative.
This new work can be seen as Ho’s attempt to close a loop, and develop a hybrid cinematic language based on the latest possibilities offered by algorithmic technologies and artificial intelligence. The result is a hallucinatory experience, a tropical gothic, where AI-generated voices don’t tell a single story, but suggest a multiplicity of narratives.
Phantoms of Endless Day is an attempt to redeem and reinvent the past into new possible futures. Extending Ho Tzu Nyen’s distinctive interest in exploring fragmented histories, philosophical thought and narrative complexity, the work becomes a fresh lens through which to experience his singular visual and sonic universe. Alongside several of the artist’s major works, The Nameless (2015), The Name (2015), One or Several Tigers (2017), Hotel Aporia (2019), and T for Time (2023-ongoing), this exhibition reveals a practice deeply rooted in a dense, interconnected universe that resists simple contemplation to offer an experience that is at once emotional, intellectual, fluid and infinitely generative.
