Kiang Malingue is pleased to present “Three Stories: Monsters, Opium, Time”, an exhibition of recent films and video installations by Ho Tzu Nyen. This is the esteemed artist's second exhibition with Kiang Malingue, showcasing three independent bodies of work: “Night March of Hundred Monsters” (2021),O for Opium(2023), and a suite of more than forty “Timepieces” (2023).Timepieceswas first shown at Ho’s recent mid-career survey show,Time & the Tigerat the Singapore Art Museum, which subsequently travelled to Art Sonje Center, Hessel Museum of Art, and Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, next to be shown at the Hamburger Kunsthalle in November 2025.
Known for critically reflecting upon the construction of history, myth, ideas and identities by working across a range of media in the past two decades, Ho continues to explore subjects as diverse as yōkai (monsters, demons, or spectres as they are known in Japan) and its intertwining with histories of Japanese Imperialism; the history of the opium trade; and the concept of time in particular manifestations. “Three Stories: Monsters, Opium, Time” is a structured exhibition that alludes totrailokyaor thethree realms, the religious division of the world into three domains: the netherworld, the earth, and heaven, allocated to the three-storied building of Kiang Malingue.
In the place of the netherworld, “Night March of Hundred Monsters” is an ongoing project that is directly inspired by the Japanese folkloric tradition of envisioning a horde of monsters parading through nocturnal darkness. For the two “Night March of Hundred Monsters” video installations that are shown in a quasi-cinema setting made specifically for the exhibition, Ho has observed the tradition and compiled, in his signature style, an animated encyclopaedia of monsters in which each individual yōkai is carefully depicted. In his picture scroll, however, one sees not only legendary monsters such as the Kitsune (Fox Spirit), Kappa (River Sprite) or Tanuki (Raccoon Dog). A number of historical Japanese individuals who participated in the occupation of the Malayan Peninsula during World War II, including General Tomoyuki Yamashita and the wartime secret agent Yutaka Tani—both of whom were widely known as the Tiger of Malaya, have found their way into Ho’s bestiary. Ho further complicates the structure of the origin stories by identifying the monsters in historical events: The Illusionary Monk, for example, is identified as the many Japanese soldiers who metamorphosed into monks in the last days of World War II. Another fabled creature, Mokumokuren (Many Eyes of the Screen), is described as an analogy for the Thought Police in George Orwell's1984. These creatures remain firmly embedded in the everyday imagination, imputed into the realm of popular culture through Japanese media such as anime and manga.
In the second story,O for Opium, Ho revisits the history of the aestheticisation of opium and the opium trade, presenting an intricate image of the substance. The artist layers an array of visual materials atop each other: Archive footage of the opium trade in the Golden Triangle region; scenes from films in which opium plays a significant role, includingOnce Upon a Time in America(1984)andRouge(1988); and an animated index of opium-related objects composed of smoke. These overlapping layers demonstrate the ambrosial, phantasmagorical effects of the substance, with history unfolding like a hazy, opiate-laced dream. First shown at the Thailand Biennale in 2023,O for Opiumis a poignant treatise on the power, movement, and glorification of opium, a unique colonial instrument that helped shape the modern world.
The last story, which addresses the heterogeneous quality of time, consists of forty-three individual screen-based “Timepieces” that explore multiple temporalities. Co-commissioned by Singapore Art Museum, Art Sonje Center, and M+, in collaboration with Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo and Sharjah Art Foundation, the works are presented on customized screens that render time physical, testifying to time’s paradoxical materiality, elasticity, and relativity. Pondering time as an ethereal thing that is paradoxically all-encompassing, Ho also ensures that individual “Timepieces” are ontologically different: from one-second animated videos in an eternal loop, to applications—such asPerfect Lovers (Gonzalez-Torres)orC4 (Harrison’s Clock)—running on a 24-hour cycle that computationally corresponds to local time, fastened steadily to lived realities. The suite of “Timepieces” is an accompaniment to Ho’s major installationT for Time(2023), presently on view at Mudam Luxembourg, contemplating our contemporary experience of time as rooted in European concepts of linear progression, regulated by the Gregorian calendar, and networked by computers. Ho's ambitious project raises the question of whether it is possible to reclaim the unassimilated experiences of time that were manifest in Southeast Asia prior to the influence of the West. As described by Ho: “In many ways, the challenge of this project was how the multiple can be composed, and how these different kinds of times can coexist without hierarchy and without collapsing into an empty pluralism.”
