Ho Tzu Nyen's 2025 Exhibitions Explore Nonlinear Time and Spectral Histories

Ho Tzu Nyen's artistic practice interrogates fragmented, non-linear histories that resist colonial and imperial narratives, employing archival materials in what resembles spectral archaeology. In February 2025, his exhibition 'Time & the Tiger' debuted at Mudam in Luxembourg, focusing on two central motifs: time as nonlinear with loops and returns, and the tiger as a symbol of recursive time spanning epochs. The following month, March 2025, saw the unveiling of 'Three Stories: Monsters, Opium, Time' at Kiang Malingue in Hong Kong. This exhibition featured Timepieces (2023), an installation of 43 individual screens each cycling through durations ranging from one second to 24 hours, with each screen maintaining its own rhythm. Ho Tzu Nyen references diverse influences in the work, including Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), the domestic stillness in Yasujiro Ozu's films, Félix González-Torres's clocks, and a beating heart. The artist explains the central challenge as composing the multiple and enabling different kinds of time to coexist without hierarchy. His work reveals what official records have obscured or mythologized, bringing his inquiries to new geographies and scales in 2025.