Re-animating Imperial Ruins: Ho Tzu Nyen’s Visions of Singapore

Elizabeth Son has defined a “redressive act,” as an “embodied practice that involves multiple audiences in actively reengaging with traumatic pasts to work toward social, political, cultural, and epistemological change.” How can the traumatic legacies of the violent, multi-national histories of Imperialism in Asia be addressed through contemporary artistic practice? Ho Tzu Nyen, (born in 1976), creates film, video, performance, and immersive multimedia artworks that engage with Singapore’s colonial history. This presentation will focus on how Ho’s Night of a Hundred Monsters (2021) and Hotel Aporia (2019) reveal imperialist tendencies from the 1930s and 1940s that continue today. Hotel Aporia was displayed at the controversial Aichi Triennale in Japan in a building that had housed the Kirakutei, a restaurant and inn where members of the Tokkotai (“Special Attack Unit” aka Kamikaze) spent their final nights. In this installation, Ho brings together members of that special attack unit, a group of Kyoto School philosophers during wartime, and cultural workers (such as film director Ozu Yasujiro and animator Yokoyama Ryuichi) who were dispatched to the South Seas as members of a propaganda corps. In Night of a Hundred Monsters, Ho utilizes VR technology and animation to explore themes of nationalism and violence in the Japanese Imperial period. How do these works engage these concealed histories? What does Ho Tzu Nyen’s recent rise in the Japanese contemporary art scene suggest about the politics of the present?