The earliest documented sighting of a tiger in Singapore was in 1831. It reported that a Chinese national had been killed by one. As the island’s lush virgin jungles were home to prey like pigs and deer, tigers found them to be ideal for hunting. Known to be excellent swimmers, they swam across the Straits of Johor to Singapore.
In the mid-19th century, tiger attacks became so common that one life was claimed every day after vast swathes of forests were cleared to make way for roads and plantations.
Subsequently, the government offered financial rewards for every tiger killed, ultimately driving them to extinction. The last wild tiger, spotted in Choa Chu Kang, was shot and killed in 1930.
Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen has always been fascinated by the origins of the city-state, and he uses facts and fiction to create alternate histories that create and dispel myths, so it is not surprising that the tiger figures prominently in his work.
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The feline first appeared in his 2003 video Utama – Every Name in History is I, which was about the founding of Singapore by Sang Nila Utama, a Srivijayan prince from Palembang, who landed on its shores in 1299 and named it Singapura (“Lion City”), after an animal he spotted while hunting. Most likely, he mistook a tiger for a lion.
One or Several Tigers is Tzu Nyen’s 2017 installation based on Heinrich Leutemann’s print of Irish architect George Coleman being attacked by a tiger while conducting a road survey. It also includes images of weretigers and Indian convicts, who were sometimes victims of tigers, as they were forced to construct colonial buildings.
Among a horde of supernatural, shapeshifting yokai demons from Japanese folklore in Night March of Hundred Monsters, we find Japanese historical figures who participated in the WWII occupation of the Malayan Peninsula: General Tomoyuki Yamashita and Yutaka Tani, who was both a bandit and secret agent. In Tzu Nyen’s procession into Japan’s past, both have been incarnated as weretigers nicknamed “Tiger of Malaya”. Tigers, he says, are one of the few threads that connect South-east Asia.
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He explains,“They dispersed across South-east Asia more than a million years ago when it was still a single landmass known as the Sunda Shelf. Perhaps that is why many early animistic cosmologies in South-east Asia associate the tiger with the ancestral. Maybe I should say that rather than me choosing the tiger, it is the tiger that has chosen me.”
Delving into the hidden layers of South-east Asian history, Tzu Nyen’s main obsession has been the region’s plethora of cultural identities and definitions, which culminated in his ongoing meta project, The Critical Dictionary of South-east Asia. A multisensory experience, his dictionary integrates texts, music and online images, and an algorithm to select and merge different sounds and visuals on an alphabetical list of concepts, created while he was in residency at Hong Kong’s Asia Art Archive a decade ago.
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“It began with a rather simple question: what constitutes the unity of South-east Asia, a region that has never been unified by language, religion or political power?” he points out.
“In response to this question, I need to engage in an act of composition… an artistic activity. My interest in history emerged solely from my attempt to understand my present. However, my interest in the past lies not in historical truth, but in the line between fact and fiction that has influenced our present-day attitudes and actions.”
As a filmmaker, painter, experimental installation artist, performer, and writer, Tzu Nyen’s multifaceted practice touches on a wide range of subjects and incorporates references from history, literature, art, and music. It sometimes gets so complex that he finds it difficult to describe it himself.
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Injecting fantastical elements into diverse archival materials accumulated over years of research like a historian, he creates new historical narratives that have been shown at the Venice, Cannes, Sundance and Berlin film festivals, as well as at The Guggenheim in New York, Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, and the Shanghai Biennale.
“I suppose the complexity of my works has grown in terms of their processes and technique,” he discloses. “I am finding it harder and harder to summarise what I do, and I have become worse than ever at delivering elevator pitches about them. However, this indescribability is something that I find quite interesting enough to keep me going!”
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Born in Singapore in 1976, Tzu Nyen earned a bachelor’s degree in creative arts from the University of Melbourne, then from the National University of Singapore with a master’s in South-east Asian studies. His father worked for the Housing Development Board and his mother for the military. “I still have very vivid memories of the construction and reclamation sites where my dad used to work,” he recalls.
“Back in those days, he loved watching films and took my older brother and me to see everything. When I was quite young, my brother, who is now an architect, introduced me to interesting music and books. But I had no exposure to the fine arts until the day when I chanced upon a book about Marcel Duchamp. He was very much the first artist that made an impression on me.”
Working without a fixed creative or production process and with different teams depending on the project, Tzu Nyen starts afresh practically every time, with some pieces beginning as questions and others from an encounter with another artwork, a piece of music or a book.
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It was, for example, from French philosopher and art historian Hubert Damisch’s book A Theory of /Cloud /: Toward a History of Painting (Cultural Memory in the Present), which traces the history of cloud paintings in Western art history, that he was inspired to produce The Cloud of Unknowing, an epic creation he presented at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011.
“Somehow, I was obsessed with portraying the experience of reading that book as a kind of drama within a low-income estate in Singapore,” he notes. “The mixing of incongruous elements seems to be a recurrent strategy in my different works.”
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Similarly, Language proposed a selection of texts by three Japanese wartime philosophers of the so-called Kyoto School that was set to disparate visual conditions, including nothingness, a decomposing political prisoner, and a disintegrating mecha (an anime robot).
Specially commissioned by Acute Art for an interactive outdoor augmented reality exhibition in front of the National Gallery that was part of Singapore’s Light to Night Festival earlier this year, it marked the first time that the AR art production studio featured the work of a Singaporean artist alongside the likes of Tomas Saraceno, Cao Fei, Olafur Eliasson, Alicja Kwade and KAWS on its international roster.
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Currently working on a VR piece about humidity and infrastructural systems and preparing a future project about time and synchronisation, Tzu Nyen describes what he hopes to achieve through his art at the end of the day: “I think that artists exist to channel other realities into this one. Artists are like mediums for other worlds. But they don’t necessarily have to convey messages.”
Among this next projects is a group show about the lines, infrastructures and networks criss-crossing the globe that reflect uneven distribution that’s called Lonely Vectors that opened last month at Singapore Art Museum, and a special exhibition called To Where the Flowers are Blooming during the 2022 Venice Biennale that’s on till Nov 27.
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