“Ho Tzu Nyen: Time & the Cloud” Installation view. ©Art Sonje CenterArt Sonje Center presents “Ho Tzu Nyen: Time & the Cloud”, a comprehensive solo exhibition showcasing the artistic journey of Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen, until August 4. Spanning two decades of his practice, this expansive exhibition explores complex layers of modernity in the postcolonial contemporary Asia.
Ho’s exploration transcends geographical boundaries, delving into social, cultural, political, and economic realms across Southeast Asia and beyond. For Ho, modernity in Asia is a complex and multilayered cultural phenomenon that cannot be explained solely by the Western dialectical logic of progress. The artist’s research serves as the foundation for his latest endeavor, T for Time (2023-2024) and Timepieces (2023-2024), presented for the first time in Korea.
This exhibition focuses on Ho’s work, centering on three works: The Cloud of Unknowing (2011), Hotel Aporia (2019), and T for Time (2023-present). Art Sonje Center is particularly interested in these works because they highlight Ho’s exploration of modernity as it relates to everyday life, politics, culture, and time. The artist explores the present in Asia as a new space where the West and Asia, Asia and Asia, empire and colony, and colony and colony meet, collide, and form.
However, this exploration goes beyond simple binary oppositions to describe the present in Asia, where many different modernities collide and break down, where they are both understood and misunderstood, and where new possibilities are created and expanded.
In 2022, the Art Sonje Center and Singapore Art Museum collaborated to explore Ho Tzu Nyen’s artistic world and co-produced T for Time, in collaboration with M+, with support from Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo and Sharjah Art Foundation, and the Korean Foundation for International Cultural Exchange. This joint effort led to the exhibition “Ho Tzu Nyen: Time & the Cloud”.
