Everyone thinks they know what time is — as Saint Augustine suggests in Book XI of the Confessions — until they are asked to explain it. Ho Tzu Nyen tries to solve this puzzle of time, to grasp it in all its slippery, shape-shifting forms. The forty-three screens glowing in Timepieces (2023), for example – one of the chapters of his exhibition “Three Stories: Monsters, Opium, Time” at Kiang Malingue – present as a sort of control room for our racing, scattered thoughts. In this den bathed in sickly soothing pink, violet, and ghastly green tones, each video, playing on a variety of screen sizes, illustrates a timeline of its own, completely unsynched to the timelines driving the individual universes on the walls around it. A simply illustrated life cycle of a sunflower has no bearing on what we have been taught as the “longer” life cycle of the Milky Way Galaxy nearby, thirteen billion years down, four to seven billion years to go, where we can spot ourselves on a beaming little Earth. Two skinny, parallel screens each shoot a jittery, glitching arrow in the opposite direction, capturing its journey through the air, witnessed as a slow-motion threat to its target. Two aligned wall clocks, resembling Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s Untitled (Perfect Lovers) (1987–90), a tribute to his partner’s struggle with AIDS and their time together, as well as a screen with Philippe de Champaigne’s 1646 painting Vanitas, with its vibrant single tulip, human skull, and hourglass, are both memento mori that measure temporality in the most personal of ways.
Night March of Hundreds of Monsters (2025) is a project shown in two segments: 100 Mini Monsters and 36 Mini Ghosts are haunting, small animations projected inside a mini theater resembling an angular, futuristic television set, a flattened form like something out of a cartoon villain’s lair. Inside, yōkai, Japanese folkloric spirits, are depicted as anime characters, including the shapeshifting fox spirit Kitsune and raccoon dog Tanuki, as well as the water spirit Kappa, a river sprite. They all parade past real, historical ghosts, including Tani Yutaka, a Japanese secret agent active during World War II in what is now considered Malaysia. An Ouroboros rolls by, with a tiger replacing the snake, eating its own tail. The tiger is one of the artist’s most prominent themes: Legend has it that one of the binding principles of the incongruous southeast Asian region is that it is the home of the tiger, as it once was when it was a united landmass known as Sundaland around the time of the last ice age. The Malayan tiger lived in Singapore’s jungles, uniting the two countries before splitting into Malaysia and the artist’s native Singapore. Inside Night March (2025), a sickening churn plays throughout the procession, with muffled screams, creaks, and crashes, making for a nonstop multisensory nightmare inside the enclosure.
Also screening is O for Opium (2023), one of the artist’s entries in his ongoing video project The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia, which began in 2012 with entries for altitude and anarchism. In O for Opium, an eerie chorus narrates the history of the drug in the region. Robert De Niro is at the opium smokehouse in the 1984 film Once Upon a Time in America, historical footage of soldiers sitting on the floor and smoking, farmers harvesting in the poppy fields. “Opium replaced silver as the currency of trading with the Chinese,” they tell us. We watch them use the drug, like people often do, in their attempts to escape the linear time that they are trapped in, “chasing the dragon” to relive the past, slow down or pause time, or experience several dimensions, times, stories at once, or even for a moment — whatever a moment could mean. Taken in together, the discordant ticks that measure movement for us — ice ages, political timelines — are as corrupt as memory.