Ho Tzu Nyen
Earth

Singaporean artist and filmmaker Ho Tzu Nyen creates works that are fields of concrete sensations. In association with Sydney Festival 2011, Artspace presents the first major exhibition of his work in Sydney, including two live sound score performances by Melbourne-based composer and musician Oren Ambarchi accompanying screenings of the title work.

The exhibition features three major video works—NEWTON (2009), ZARATHUSTRA: A FILM FOR EVERYONE AND NO-ONE (2009/2010) and the centrepiece 42 minute work EARTH (2009/2010), a ‘videographic’ remix in three long takes of 17th and 18th century Italian and French paintings in which the human body is penetrated, fragmented and re-arranged.

Ho Tzu Nyen creates audio-visual artworks that translate and compress biographies, philosophical ideas and scientific anecdotes into highly staged and choreographed ‘text-less’ images and sounds that seek to communicate at the level of the nervous system.

Echoing his approach to video and film-making, Ho Tzu Nyen choreographs every element of his exhibition installations with precision, looking to create an experience of the exhibition itself that is actively relational and intensely durational, resonating conceptually and rhythmically with the moving imagery. 

About Ho Tzu Nyen
Ho Tzu Nyen makes projects that have been presented in cinemas, galleries and theatres, as well as on television. His work evidences a strong interest in the relationship between images and sound, as well as avant-garde music from different parts of the world, and he frequently collaborates with musicians to produce new and radically divergent versions of soundtracks for his works. His first feature film, HERE, premiered at the 41st Director’s Fortnight, Cannes Film Festival (2009). His visual artworks have been presented at exhibitions such as the 26th Sao Paulo Biennale (2004); the 3rd Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale (2005); the 1st Singapore Biennale (2006); and the Dojima River Biennale (2009). ZARATHUSTRA: A FILM FOR EVERYONE AND NO-ONE, a doom-metal adaptation and ‘compression’ of Nietzsche’s philosophical novel, was made in collaboration with film, music, fine arts, acting and musical theatre students from a Singaporean arts college, for the 6th Asia-Pacific Triennial (2009) in Queensland, Australia. 

About Oren Ambarchi
Oren Ambarchi is a composer and multi-instrumentalist with longstanding interests in transcending conventional instrumental approaches. His work focuses mainly on the exploration of the guitar, ‘re-routing the instrument into a zone of alien abstraction where it’s no longer easily identifiable as itself. Instead, it’s a laboratory for extended sonic investigation’. (The Wire, UK). Ambarchi works with simple constructs and parameters; exploring one idea over an extended duration and patiently teasing every nuance and implication from each texture; the phenomena of sum and difference tones; carefully tended arrangements that unravel gently; unprepossessing melodies that slowly work their way through various permutations; resulting in an otherworldly, cumulative impact of patiently unfolding compositions.