Ho Tzu-Nyen

Ho Tzu Nyen (; born 1976) is a Singaporean contemporary artist and filmmaker whose works involve film, video, performance, and immersive multimedia installations. His work brings together fact and myth to mobilise different understandings of Southeast Asia's history, politics, and religion, often premised upon a complex set of references from art history, to theatre, cinema, and philosophy.

Placed 5th on the ArtReview'''s 2025 Power 100 list, Ho is widely considered one of the most influential artistic voices in Asia today. Ho's mid-career survey, Time & the Tiger, opened at the Singapore Art Museum in November 2023 and has since traveled to the Art Sonje Center in Seoul, the Hessel Museum of Art in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, Mudam Museum of Modern Art in Luxembourg, and Hamburger Kunsthalle in Germany. In 2011, Ho represented Singapore at the 54th Venice Biennale at the Singapore Pavilion, presenting the work The Cloud of Unknowing. Ho has also participated in several international film festivals, such as the 41st Directors' Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival in France (2009) and the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah (2012). Later from 2003 to 2007, Ho studied at the Southeast Asian Studies Programme at the National University of Singapore, obtaining a Master of Arts (by Research). Ho currently lives and works in Singapore. The titular work involved a video installation and twenty portrait paintings that re-examined the 14th-century figure of Sang Nila Utama as the pre-colonial founder of Singapore, in relation to the histories of other regional founders.

A recurring motif is the tiger, approached as an animal, mythological figure and historical metaphor. Ho first developed it through Song of the Brokenhearted Tiger (2012), a theatrical and musical performance presented at the Esplanade in Singapore. Such would include 2 or 3 Tigers (2015), presented at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Germany, and its later, expanded version, One or Several Tigers (2017), which incorporates aspects and props of the theatre piece. An interactive online platform and algorithmically composed “infinite film”, it plays with the idea of a continuous stream of audiovisual material that is constantly updated by multiple and unknown authors. Other CDOSEA projects include R for Resonance (2019), a virtual reality work examining the gong in Southeast Asia, an instrument connecting societies and individuals through ritual music, embodying a sacred cosmology. Ho co-hosted a seminar on The Kyoto School with KADIST and frequent collaborator Hyunjin Kim at the 2018 Gwanju Biennale. The first work from this project, Hotel Aporia (2020), presented at the Aichi Triennale in 2020, was later curated by Hyunjin Kim in the group show Frequencies of Tradition (2020–21) at the Guangdong Times Museum.

Ho Tzu Nyen: Time & the Tiger In November 2023, the Singapore Art Museum (SAM) opened a solo mid-career exhibition titled "Ho Tzu Nyen: Time & the Tiger" featuring eight major installations and a new commission by SAM and Art Sonje Center (ASJC) titled "T for Time". The title piece centers on the dispersion of tigers across Asia over time due to climate change of both glacial shifts and rising sea levels that have impacted tigers roaming freely to the point of near extinction presently. The exhibition is scheduled to travel to several worldwide venues after its premiere at SAM at Tanjong Pagar Distripark from November 24, 2023, to March 3, 2024.

Art Ho's work is often premised upon a dense set of interwoven references. Ho describes his films, videos, installations, and performances as tending towards theatre, particularly in relation to the notion of theatre as that which happens when one is in the presence of another.

Utama—Every Name in History is I (2003) The video installation Utama—Every Name in History is I (2003), consists of a video and twenty portrait paintings. The work depicts the 14th-century figure of Sang Nila Utama, a discoverer of Singapore, with the video weaving together apocryphal relationships with various historical regional leaders examine the legitimacy founding narratives, both assembling and dispelling myth. Time is collapsed through the deployment of the same actor to play other explorers such as Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama, Zheng He, and Singapore's British coloniser, Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles.

4x4—Episodes of Singapore Art (2005) In 2005, upon being commissioned by the Singapore Art Show to produce a new work, Ho purchased four half-hour prime-time slots of airtime on the Arts Central channel from national broadcaster, Mediacorp. The project was simultaneously a live audition, film shoot, lecture, and theatre performance; framed as a film but enacted as a play. Grounded in the building’s archival documents and Ho’s email exchanges with Yoko Nose, the Triennal’s curator, Hotel Aporia interrogates the ideological shadows of interwar Japan. The piece combines Ho’s research interests in The Kyoto School’s intellectual debates, Yasujiro Ozu and Ryuichi Yokohama’s films (and subsequent time in Southeast Asia), as well as stories about the Kamikaze unit’s ceremonial dinner at the artwork’s installation site. Epistolary in form, Hotel Aporia features scripted voiceover dialogue between Ho and five interlocutors: Yoko Nose (curator, Aichi Triennale 2019), Kazue Suzuki (the project’s assistant translator), Tomoyuki Arai (dramaturg and Ho’s frequent collaborator), and two marginal wartime figures, Sakae Miyauchi (a member of the kamikaze Kusanagi Unit) and Yukiko Nagasaka (a landlady of the Kiraku-Tei).

Night Charades (2025) Night Charades is the first of Ho’s works to experiment with AI-generated imagery. Similar to Ho’s recent body of work over the past decade, the piece utilizes an algorithmic editing system to create non-linear combinations of characters and scenes, most of which reference Hong Kong’s cinematic history. Co-commissioned by M+ and Art Basel and presented by UBS, the piece debuted on the M+ Museum’s facade at the beginning of Art Basel Hong Kong in 2025 and remained there every night for three months.

P for Power (2026) P for Power, a single-channel video installation which premiered at BOZAR Brussels in February 2026, is Ho’s latest iteration of CDOSEA. The piece contains 30 algorithmically-edited chapters that explore how “power” proliferates in Southeast Asia. The piece was initially inspired by Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza who speaks of power “not as a domination, but as the capacity to affect and be affected.”

Awards and residencies

Ho was named Singapore's first Grand Prize recipient at the Fukuoka Prize ceremony in 2026.

In 2015, Ho was awarded the Grand Prize of the Asia Pacific Breweries Foundation Signature Art Prize, Singapore, for the work PYTHAGORAS (2013). NEWTON (2009), Mori Art Museum, Tokyo The Cloud of Unknowing (2011), Mori Art Museum, Tokyo The Cloud of Unknowing (2011), Singapore Art Museum The Cloud of Unknowing (2011), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York The Name (2015-2017) and The Nameless (2015), Singapore Art Museum One or Several Tigers (2017), Singapore Art Museum The Mysterious Lai Teck (2018), Red Brick Museum, Beijing Hotel Aporia (2019), Singapore Art Museum Phantoms of Endless Day (2025), LUMA Arles