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until 21.03. | #4769ARTatBerlin | neugerriemschneider (Christinenstrasse) shows from 12. September 2025 (Opening: 11.09.) the exhibition “2 stories: void & times” by the artist Ho Tzu Nyen.
Ho Tzu Nyen’s first solo exhibition at neugerriemschneider, 2 stories: voids & times, presents two recent multi-sensory spatial installations by the artist in an ensemble that builds on his recent wide-ranging institutional exhibitions in Asia and Europe, focussing on his extended exploration of legends and fictions, unresolved social issues and contradictory ideals. Key to this exploration is Ho’s use of video – a medium he developed a fondness for during his formative years in Singapore – and his curious extension of this technique into the realms of new technologies. Here, with a unique combination of ambitious audiovisual environments, Ho enables the experiential embodiment of cross-cultural phenomena and perceived truths to be unravelled and reconfigured.
Ho Tzu Nyen, Timepieces, 2023. Installation view: Singapore Art Museum, 2024, © Ho Tzu Nyen. Courtesy the artist, neugerriemschneider, Berlin, Kiang Malingue, Hong Kong and New York and Singapore Art Museum. Photo: Memphis West pictures
Ho leads a practice steeped in and based upon fused histories, including those of fine art, theater, cinema, music and philosophy, creating works that nonhierarchically draw on mythical narratives and verifiable fact in equal measure. New understandings of storytelling, its underpinnings, and of the ways in which anecdotes are written, transmitted and received, come to light as Ho mines the plurality of cultural, linguistic and religious identities of Southeast Asia and the myriad complexities that lie beyond. In filmic ensembles and installations, all of which are as technologically intricate as they are conceptually rigorous, observatory investigation takes physical form, weaving a tapestry of knowledge where documentary meets fantasy, and the archival becomes animated. Ho’s work comes to channel dimensional legacies, giving voice to spirits of resistance and revealing their masked ambiguities.
Ho Tzu Nyen, Voice of Void, 2021. Installation view: Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media, 2021 © Ho Tzu Nyen. Courtesy the artist, neugerriemschneider, Berlin and Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media. Photo: Ichiro Mishima
Voice of Void (2021), Ho’s virtual reality-supported video projection, transforms two rooms of the exhibition into scenes from the secret roundtable discussion “The World Historical Point of View and Japan” from November 1941, which is still controversial today due to its philosophical debate on military action. Led by the philosophers Keiji Nishitani, Masaaki Kosaka, Iwao Koy-ama and Shigetaka Suzuki, this round table attempted to develop a theory of world history against the backdrop of Japan’s involvement in the Second World War. The concepts expressed here emerged from the Kyoto School of the early 20th century – a movement that aimed to replace the prevailing Eurocentric ways of thinking with a philosophy that originated and was cultivated in Asia.
Ho Tzu Nyen, Voice of Void, 2021. Installation view: Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media, 2021,© Ho Tzu Nyen. Courtesy the artist, neugerriemschneider, Berlin and Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media. Photo: Ichiro Mishima
The discussions of the past and visions of the future at the symposium that formed the starting point for Ho’s work were often fragmented and dissonant, raising more questions than they answered as the global community descended into war. The theories and lives of Ho’s protagonists play out in multi-layered projections that show computer-generated models of science-fic-tion mecha-robots in flight, a prison structure seen both from the inside and from a disembodied wide-angle perspective, and the roundtable session itself. An off-screen voice gives whispered introductions to the school’s approaches, while virtual reality headsets laid out on tatami mats invite the viewer to enter the work and participate as a participant in various scenes, starting with a meeting in a tea room, switching between characters, scenarios, perspectives, histories and timelines.
Ho Tzu Nyen, Voice of Void, 2021. Installation view: Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media, 2021, © Ho Tzu Nyen. Courtesy the artist, neugerriemschneider, Berlin and Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media. Photo: Ichiro Mishima
This search for diversity takes on a different form in his 43-channel video installation T for Time: Timepieces (2023 – 2024). Here, the historical and geopolitical specificity of Ho’s Voice of Void shifts and expands to encompass collected moments centred around the concept of time itself. A simultaneous matrix of interactive applications and animated images such as an apple being peeled, a calendar turning over, a bomb being neutralised, a burning candle, Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ “Untit-led” (Perfect Lovers) (1987 – 1990 and 1991) or ascending arrows illuminate the various ways in which a force of nature has been contained, defined, enumerated and made into a worldview. In this work, time, as it is understood according to structured criteria, is dissolved, its colonial impulses are unfolded and analysed. Working with multiple screens, individual scenes, ranging from seconds to hours or years, function as their own differently scaled “timepieces” – modules that represent temporality as personal, biological or sociological and embed it in a non-linear narrative. A uniquely malleable time takes hold as Ho introduces subjectivities and cultural pluralities, creating visual worlds connected by their concrete visualisations of an immaterial drive, reshaping the forward march of the clock.
Ho Tzu Nyen, Voice of Void, 2021. Installation view: Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media, 2021, © Ho Tzu Nyen. Courtesy the artist, neugerriemschneider, Berlin and Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media. Photo: Ichiro Mishima
Ho Tzu Nyen (*1976) is currently represented with solo exhibitions at Mudam Luxembourg (until 24 August 2025) and LUMA Arles (until 11 January 2026). In November this year, this institutional presence will continue at the Hamburger Kunsthalle with a comprehensive overview of his most important works (21 November 2025 – 12 April 2026). Ho has been the subject of solo exhibitions at international museums and institutions, including the Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg (2025); the Hessel Museum of Art, Ann-andale-on-Hudson (2024); the Art Sonje Center, Seoul (2024); the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Tokyo (2024); the Singapore Art Museum, Singapore (2023); the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2022); the Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, Toyota (2021); Crow Museum of Asian Art of The University of Texas at Dallas, Dallas (2021); Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media, Yamaguchi (2021); Edith-Russ-Haus für Medienkunst, Oldenburg (2019); Kunstverein in Hamburg, Hamburg (2018); Ming Contemporary Art Museum, Shanghai (2018); Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong (2017); Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Bilbao (2015); Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2012); and The Substation, Singapore (2003). His work has been shown at the Venice Biennale (2011, Singa-pore Pavilion). He is currently Artistic Director of the Gwangju Biennale (2026). Ho lives and works in Singapore.
Opening: Thursday, 11. September, 6 – 10 pm.
Exhibition dates: Friday, 12. September 2025 – Saturday, 21. March 2026
To the gallery
Title image caption: Ho Tzu Nyen, Timepieces, 2023. Installation view: Hessel Museum of Art, Centre for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale on Hudson, NY, 2024, © Ho Tzu Nyen. Courtesy the artist and neugerriemschneider, Berlin. Photo: Olympia Shannon
Exhibition Ho Tzu Nyen – Galerie neugerriemschneider | Zeitgenössische Kunst in Berlin | Contemporary Art | Ausstellungen Berlin Galerien | ART at Berlin
