Michael Janssen Singapore is pleased to present Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen, whose exhibition PYTHAGORAS opens on Wednesday, October 23, 2013. PYTHAGORAS is Ho Tzu Nyen’s first one-person exhibition in Singapore since the groundbreaking Utama – Every Name in History is I in 2003.
Pythagoras of Samos (c. 570 BC – c. 495 BC) was an Ionian Greek philosopher, mathematician, and founder of the religious movement called Pythagoreanism, in which disciples were required to sit in absolute silence while listening to their master’s voice from behind a veil. Built around the notions of veils and ventriloquism, PYTHAGORAS brings together the ghosts of existing artworks and
the premonitions of new artworks, all in a phantasmagoric play of sound and image, motion and stillness, light and darkness. In a room, we find MILTON (2013), the blind and furious seer, called forth from the ruins of EARTH (2009), as NEWTON (2009) struggles to recast the universe according to his unbending laws of cause and effect, action and reaction. Meanwhile, alone and lost in the darkness, GOULD (2013) is touched by the disembodied hand of inspiration
as PYTHAGORAS (2013) hides behind his veil, a voice without a body, directing this raggedy troupe of wraiths. Ho Tzu Nyen works primarily in film, video, and performance, developing recent works into environmental multimedia installations. His practice involves appropriating the structures of epic myths to invoke their grandeur as well as to reveal these narratives as fiction-and-reality-machines. Recent one-person exhibitions of his work include MAM Project #16 at
the Mori Art Museum (2012), the Singapore Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale (2011) and Earth at Artspace, Sydney (2011). Recent group exhibitions include “No Country” at the Guggenheim Museum in New York (2013), 5th Auckland
Triennial in New Zealand (2013) and “Move on Asia” at the ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany. His films have been presented at festivals such as the 41st Director’s Fortnight, Cannes International Film Festival (France, 2009), 66th Venice International Film Festival (Italy, 2009), the 64th Locarno Film Festival (2011) and Sundance Film Festival (USA, 2012).