Ho Tzu Nyen and Hsu Chia-Wei Explore Mediality Through Tiger Myths and Frog Deities

Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen and Taiwanese artist Hsu Chia-Wei investigate expanded notions of media, blending technological and human mediation. Hsu's video installation Spirit-Writing (2016), featured in the 10th Taipei Biennial, documents a divination ritual for Marshal Tie Jia, a frog deity displaced from Jiangxi, China, to an island in the Taiwan Strait. Using motion capture and green screen techniques, the work transposes the ritual into a 3D simulation, creating a digital refuge that mirrors historical iconoclasm. Ho's two-screen video installation One or Several Tigers (2017) expands on his earlier works, treating the tiger as a medium channeling silenced colonial histories. Inspired by a 1860s lithograph by Heinrich Leutemann depicting a tiger attack on surveyor George Drumgoole Coleman in Singapore, Ho uses CGI to render spectral, orbiting figures, conducting a counter-survey of modernity's abstractions. Both artists engage with themes of groundlessness, colonial modernity, and the convergence of digital and spirit media, challenging art historical and media theoretical divides. Their works reference scholars like Kevin Chua and theorists such as Bruno Latour, while invoking concepts from Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze. The analysis draws from the Spring 2017 issue of ArtReview Asia, framing contemporary art as a laboratory for mediality amid modernity's ontological uncertainties.