4×4 – Episodes of Singapore Art is an attempt to re-interpret four works of art by four Singaporean artists. The project grew out of a desire to address two cultural deficits in Singapore: An audience for the visual arts and a collective historical memory. 4×4 took place across three different platforms: A forum discussion, a foldable postcard cube for distribution, and a television series which aired on Singapore’s Arts Central channel. The television series, in particular, encompasses video art, mass-media intervention, cultural sleuthing, polemics, and pedagogy. Set as dialectic arguments between a man and a woman, the episodes attempt to popularise techniques of visual analysis and interpretation from the history of art. A collaborative effort between the worlds of visual art and television production, 4×4 was conceived to tie in with the Singapore Art Show 2005, also marking the earliest instances of the Arts Central television channel being used as a platform to present video art.

(Image courtesy of the artist and Kiang Malingue.)

Steeped in numerous Eastern and Western cultural references ranging from art history to theatre and from cinema to music to philosophy, Ho Tzu Nyen’s works blend mythical narratives and historical facts to mobilise different understandings of history, its writing and its transmission. The central theme of his œuvre is a long-term investigation of the plurality of cultural identities in Southeast Asia, a region so multifaceted in terms of its languages, religions, cultures and influences that it is impossible to reduce it to a simple geographical area or some fundamental historical base. This observation as to the history of this region of the world is reflected in his pieces which weave together different regimes of knowledge, narratives and representations. From documentary research to fantasy, his work combines archival images, animation and film in installations that are often immersive and theatrical.

One-person exhibitions of his work have been held at LUMA Arles (2025), Mudam Museum of Modern Art (2025), Hessel Museum of Art (2024), Art Sonje Center (2024), Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (2024), Singapore Art Museum (2023), Hammer Museum (2022), Toyota Municipal Museum of Art (2021), Crow Museum of Asian Arts (2021), Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media [YCAM] (2021), Edith-Russ-Haus for Media Art (Oldenburg, 2019), Kunstverein in Hamburg (2018), Ming Contemporary Art Museum [McaM] (Shanghai, 2018), Asia Art Archive (2017), Guggenheim Bilbao (2015), Mori Art Museum, (2012), The Substation (Singapore, 2003). He represented the Singapore Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale (2011).

Ho Tzu Nyen has been appointed Artistic Director of the 2026 Gwangju Biennale.

(Image courtesy of Singapore Art Museum.)