After representing Singapore at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011, local multimedia artist Ho Tzu Nyen marks his first solo show on home soil in ten years with PYTHAGORAS – an exhibition of four films shown simultaneously in a darkened room (lasting just over a half hour), touching on themes of control and being controlled (they’re also each named after historic figures: Newton, Milton, Gould and Pythagoras). Gwen Pew finds out five more things to know about the 37-year-old video and theatre artist.
28 Nov 2013:
1
The last solo show Ho did here was in 2003, but he’s been far from slacking: ‘Since 2003, I’ve made a number of theatre pieces (including King Lear at the 2008 Singapore Arts Festival), a TV series (4 x 4 – Episodes of Singapore Art, 2005) and a feature film (EARTH, 2009 – select scenes are remixed into MILTON). I’ve also been involved with some projects outside of Singapore.’
2
Although many of his works involve theatre, his preferred type of live performance is actually music (GOULD is named after pianist Glen Gould): ‘To be honest, I don’t really enjoy going to the theatre. However, I do love the small things [about theatre] such as the lights, the speakers, the mechanisms. And I think this is apparent in the exhibition.’
3
He’s ‘always been a little obsessed with curtains’, which the titular film is projected onto: ‘[They are the] most ordinary and most mysterious of objects. They make known the presence of wind, they catch light, and they hover so elegantly between the inside and the outside.’
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Summing up his thoughts on PYTHAGORAS, Ho says: ‘I think of this exhibition as a theatrical machine caught in a loop, where the ghosts of former works have been summoned to accompany a choir of melancholic machines.’
5
Looking ahead… ‘My next project is called Ten Thousand Tigers, and it is an attempt to tell the story of this region through the history of Malayan tigers – real, spectral and metaphorical. This will be a live performance next April.’
GWEN PEW 