HO TZU NYEN

Ho Tzu Nyen (b. 1976) is an artist and filmmaker whose distinguished practice operates at the intersection of cinema, archival record, and subversive intervention. Spanning film, video, performance, and installation, his work interrogates how historical narratives are constructed and consumed within postcolonial and transnational landscapes, particularly across the shared borders of East and Southeast Asia. Drawing from regional histories, myths, philosophy, and popular culture, his projects stage encounters between fact and fiction, archival material and speculation.

Hotel Aporia (2019) is a seminal multi-channel installation that exemplifies Ho’s rigorous research and haunting visual language. It functions as a philosophical impasse—an “aporia”—that zooms in on the ideological shadows of interwar Japan. The work features a cast who were complexly entangled with this period through separate trajectories: kamikaze pilots, whose internalized sacrifice was a tactic for national victory; the philosophers of the Kyoto School with conflicted views on war lesser-known than their Zen and Buddhist thoughts; and cultural figures such as filmmaker Ozu Yasujiro (1903-1963) and animation director Yokoyama Ryuichi (1909-2001), both of whom were stationed in Southeast Asia as part of the Japanese Imperial Army’s propaganda units.

Ho delineates their accounts with an assembly of archival footage and excerpts from Ozu and Yokoyama’s films, with all protagonists’ faces redacted. These images are interwoven with correspondences between Ho and his Japanese collaborators, who observe this history from the present. Together, these layers explore the convergence of militarist imperialism and cultural and intellectual production during the Second World War in Japan.

Originally commissioned for the Aichi Triennale, the work was first sited within Kirakutei, a Taisho-era inn where kamikaze pilots spent their final nights. Even outside its original site, the installation preserves the spectral silhouettes of this traditional architecture, utilizing Ozu’s signature “tatami shots”—a perspective filmed from near floor level—to ground the viewer in a specific psychological space. Ho impels a physical encounter with history’s “ghosts”: those figures and events that remain caught between life and death, or memory and erasure. Ultimately, Hotel Aporia positions history as a recurring frequency, suggesting that the ideological forces of the past persist in our contemporary reality.