Project Fulfill Art Space is pleased to announce the solo exhibition “EARTH” by one of the most important contemporary artists in Singapore Ho Tzu Nyen.
Ho Tzu Nyen’s practice ranges across filmmaking, painting, performance and writing, and investigates the forms, methods and languages of art; the relationship between the still, the painted and the moving image; and the construction of history. His films expose the apparatus of cinema by mixing varied genres from music video to documentary, creating highly artificial sets, or by making cameras, crew and lighting a key part of the action.
Three signature video pieces will be shown: EARTH, NEWTON and GOULD.
“EARTH”
What the video EARTH does to paintings such as Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, Girodet’s The Sleep of Endymion, and Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa is analogical to the operations that these images perform on the human body – a process of suspension, penetration, fragmentation and re-configuration.
We see the site of an unknown disaster, where fifty 50 humans oscillate between consciousness and unconsciousness, life and death, as the light constantly alternates between warm to cool, day to night.
EARTH is accompanied by a soundtrack composed of fragments of sounds picked up from films old and new, near and distant. Freed from the body of their original hosts, these found fragments populate the crumbling world of EARTH like ghosts.
“NEWTON”
NEWTON can be understood as a story about the beginning of a work of art (perhaps a story about itself). It begins with a falling book – a flash of inspiration that kick-starts a chain of events leading to the creation of an artwork which is nothing but the staging of its own origin – the rebirth of its own inspiration.
But the title also suggests that this work may refer to the anecdote of how Isaac Newton discovered gravity after being hit by a falling apple. Seen in this light, the mechanical and precise structure of the video is a demonstration of the laws of causality that structures the clockwork nature of Newton’s universe. And just as the Newtonian world is infinitely repeatable, and reversible, this video is constructed as a loop, where the end leads to another beginning.
But yet nothing is truly repeated – it is as though the ghost of differentiation perpetually haunts this dream of infinite repetition.
“GOULD”
We see a disembodied hand upon a head and we hear a distorted piano track, interfered by a drone. Sometimes it seems like the hand is pushing the head, and at other times it seems to be the head that wills the hand. This might be a sketch of the ambiguities involved in power and resistance, inspiration and hallucination. But it could also be a highly compressed, emblematic portrait of Gould – as in the pianist Glenn Gould. He possesses the music, as the music possesses him.