P for Power: Singaporean contemporary artist Ho Tzu Nyen presents first solo show in Belgium

Towering multidisciplinary artist Ho Tzu Nyen tackles the thorny concept of power in his first Belgian solo show at Bozar.

P for Power is a new video installation commissioned by the Brussels art centre that further fuels the Singaporean artist’s unparallelled survey of history and cultural identity in not only Southeast Asia, but the West.

This evolving work continues his predilection for algorithm driven images and sequences and pursues a new interest in Artificial Intelligence, while retaining his entrancing blend of myth, art history, philosophy, cinema, music, theatre and animation.

It is shown alongside two other installations: Time Pieces and T for Time that reveal Tzu Nyen’s extensive interrogation of temporality. While exploring the origins of the practice of time keeping in the East and the West, including Greenwich Mean Time, he raises questions about the multiplicity of Asian identity and the myths and influences that drive its present-day transformation.

Together, the installations offer an overview of the artist’s singular multimedia approach and vision via the highly-accessible medium of animated video.

The starting point for his oeuvre is the perplexing question of how to define Southeast Asian culture? Encompassing Brunei, Myanmar, Cambodia, Timor-Leste, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam, it boasts a profusion of identities, languages, religions and influence.

P for Power is part of Tzu Nyen’s ongoing series The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia (CDOSEA) with its letter-specific spin-offs. This premiere showing lands at a moment when the notion of power is being scrutinised worldwide, from challenges to democratic power and the rise of dictatorships.

The video installation itself centres around a conversation between the artist and an AI chatbot about the nature of power. “My interest with employing algorithms and AI systems is solely for their capacity for generating a multiplicity of different possible versions and timelines to a single input,” he points out.

If the existential notion of time as a linear flow, “one of the greatest mysteries of the universe,” is a creative source for the artist, another inspiration was the subjective expressionist poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. It is just one example of Tzu Nyen’s colossal reservoir of cultural references that underpin his installations.

Typically for the artist, the evolving work proved to be an unexpected journey. “I really didn’t know what was going to happen, but it was a good surprise,” he says. “We think of power as authority over other people; I like to think of it as the internal potential for growth.”  His use of images of children in the animations underlines this belief in the potential of human life.

Tzu Nyen is inadvertently, perhaps, no stranger to the concept of power, having recently been placed 5th in the Art Review Power 100, an annual ranking of the most influential people in art. As an art critic and curator, he is equally an articulate and engaging communicator.

On the ambitious feat of categorising a diverse and now dynamic Southeast Asia, he explains that the region did not exist prior to world war two and the term was a construct of the Allied forces.

“One of the ways in which I create a linkage is through tigers because they were dispersed across Southeast Asia for more than a million years,” says Tzu Nyen, as one explanation for his use of easily identifiable objects and traditions to relate more complex notions and ideas. “In Southeast  Asia we have myths and cosmology that are very much related to ancestors so this is one way in which I try to reimagine the region.”

His own identity also plays a key role in employing Western as well as Eastern references. “I have Chinese ethnicity, but was born in Singapore so local Eastern cultures are as much part of my DNA as my Chinese heritage. Western ideas came through British colonisation of Singapore. The way I think about the world is this immense synthesis of all these ideas from multiple sources.”

If there are continuously evolving shifts between the East and the West, the artist is also interested in differentiating between the East itself, as well as the West, which is equally divergent in its identity.

Exhibiting in Brussels, an important seat of power, is significant both privately and professionally. “My connections with the city are actually quite personal, as I participated in the  Kustenfesivaldesarts arts here during an important period in my own personal development as a young artist.”

P for Power
Until 14 June
Bozar
Rue Ravenstein 23
Brussels

Photos: P for Power ©courtesy Bozar and Ho Tzu Nyen; T for Time ©Memphis West Pictures, courtesy Ho Tzu Nyent, Kiang Malingue and Singapore Art Museum; Ho Tzu Nyen Portrait 2024, courtesy Singapore Art Museum; T for Time ©Memphis West Pictures, courtesy Ho Tzu Nyen, Kiang Malingue and Singapore Art Museum; P for Power ©courtesy of Bozar and Ho Tzu Nyen; P for Power ©courtesy of Bozar and Ho Tzu Nye