RUSSELL STORER
Ho Tzu Nyen: 4x4
The art historian Thomas Crow wrote in 1994 that “artists have become avid, if unpredictable,
consumers of art history”, in that “consciousness of precedent has become very nearly the
condition and definition of major artistic ambition”. To Crow, “almost every serious work
of contemporary art recapitulates, on some explicit or implicit level, the historical sequence of
objects to which it belongs”.1 This condition recalls the ‘anxiety of influence’ famously described
by Harold Bloom, who posited that every new poem is in essence a reworking of earlier poems,
with creative misreading or misprision enabling younger poets (or ephebes) to develop distinctive
voices of their own.2 As artists build endlessly on what has gone before, the field has expanded
ever-outward, breaking down master narratives into what has been called a ‘post-historical’
moment of radical plurality, in which every work of art could be said to contain only its own
history. The methodological and conceptual shifts that artists introduce to our understanding
of art are often overlooked in formal art history however, given that they can be unpredictable,
unruly, and even nihilistic, and are usually presented in the form of art itself.
The Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen is a serious student of art history (and of Bloom) and has
made this historical research the material of his art. His works draw on various local histories—
the founding myth of Singapore in the video, painting and installation project Utama: Every
Name in History is I (2003); conceptual lineages and transfers in Singaporean and Malaysian
art in the lecture performance 2 South Seas, 3 Chairs, 4 Suits (2004) and four key Singaporean
art works in 4x4: Episodes of Singapore Art (2005), which took the form of four television
episodes broadcast on Singapore’s Arts Central channel, a forum discussion and a diagrammatic,
foldable postcard cube for distribution. In Ho’s work, history is presented as provisional and
subjective, framed by a dialectical structure of multiple and often contesting points of view.
Yet Ho also has a pedagogical impulse—the desire to recover and disseminate information
that is little-known or understood to wide audiences and to encourage critical readings of that
information. In the context of Singapore, where contemporary art is marginal at best and history
is widely accepted as beginning in 1819 with the city-state’s founding by Sir Stamford Raffles, Ho’s
project contains a certain urgency, with its desire to engage broad audiences and encourage debate.
For the purposes of this text, I’ll focus on 4x4 and state my own interests—I was a participant
in the forum component, held on 16 October, 2005 at the Substation. I’d also like to note that
writing about Ho’s work is a daunting prospect, not only due to its complexity and the formidable
erudition of the artist, but also because his work openly questions authoritative or singular
readings. Most art does to some degree, but rarely is this aspect so clearly foregrounded in the
work, forcing a consideration of one’s own role as an ‘authority’. The television component of
4x4, for example, pulls apart the format of art documentaries, with their omniscient presenters,
from Robert Hughes to Sister Wendy. Ho’s twenty-two and a half minute episodes instead utilise
a binary structure of two ‘oscillating’ hosts, one female and one male, each pair mapping certain
sets of power relations—employer/employee, director/assistant, boyfriend/girlfriend—and taking
opposing views on the merits of the work in question. (This aspect has attracted some criticism
as essentialist, with the female roles positioned as progressive, if at times hysterical, arguing their
case against the reactionary male characters, who are aggressive, controlling and even violent.)
Ho’s presentation of artistic debate as an overwrought and in one case deadly struggle is
humorously exaggerated, even camp, while tapping into long-standing anxieties about
contemporary art’s irrelevance in an increasingly conservative and populist cultural and
political environment. This aspect again has specific resonances in Singapore, with its small,
concentrated art scene operating inside a primarily mercantile society hyper-managed by
the State.
Each episode of 4x4 essentially ‘remakes’ a single art work. These are Cheong Soo Pieng’s painting
Tropical Life (1959), a key example of the ‘Nanyang’ school that fused Chinese, South-East Asian
and Western modernist influences to create a local style; Cheo Chai Hiang’s conceptual work
5ft x 5ft (Singapore River), an instruction submitted to and rejected by the Modern Art Society
in 1972; Tang Da Wu’s protest performance Don’t Give Money to the Arts, in which the artist
pointedly wore a jacket emblazoned with those words when meeting the President of Singapore;
and Lim Tzay Chuen’s Alter #11 (2002), an as yet unrealised action involving a bullet being fired
into a gallery, requiring an inordinate amount of bureaucratic negotiation by the artist. Ho’s
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selection of these works spans a range of practices and periods, necessarily compressed within
Singapore’s short art history, yet also pinpoints shared themes—a sense of failure or irresolution, a
strong concern for local conditions and the uneasy presence of Western art styles. Unified by their
stark, white screen format, like a sequence of white cube galleries, the episodes playfully recreate
(and in the case of Cheo and Lim’s works, realise for the first time) each work as a narrative,
rather than an object or ‘moment’, placing it in the flow of history. The works appear not as a
direct representation but as a series of contrasting readings and discourses, incorporating pictorial
analysis, biography, social history, Marxist theory and feminism. While his strategy is reminiscent
of some appropriation art of previous decades, it presents multiple versions of the original, rather
than treating it as a singular sign. The works here appear as porous and vulnerable, even as Ho is
emphasising their iconic status.
Ho consciously rehearses Bloom’s image of the ephebe tackling the art of the past as a way
to move forward, yet rather than sublimating the original, brings it to the surface. His work
functions as a platform to disseminate these works, bringing them back to life so that they
can be re-evaluated. His choice of ‘unstable’ or unrealised art works is crucial in this regard; in
Cheo’s episode, for example, Ho clearly presents his notion of the failed or repressed art work
as ‘unfinished business’, forever doomed to return and haunt the present like Hamlet’s ghost.
In bringing these works into the present, enabling unfinished works to be finished, or ephemeral
actions to be restaged (a popular phenomenon of late—for example Marina Abramovic’s 2005
restagings of performances by Beuys, Export, Acconci and others; or the Short History of
Performance series, held at London’s Whitechapel Art Gallery in 2002–03). Ho performs a
double manoeuvre of honouring and promoting his unsung heroes while emptying them out
and parasitically occupying their space, inserting himself into history; as Ho notes, “discussions
of these works must (now) also engage with 4x4.”3 The presence of the artists in 4x4 is invisible,
shadowy or imprecise; in the episode that most requires the artist to be represented, Tang Da
Wu—The Most Radical Gesture, the figure of Tang is played by a non-look-alike, the artist John
Low, who was also selected for his deadpan lack of acting finesse. The art-documentary’s romantic
conceit of the artist at work, epitomised by the famous footage of Jackson Pollock, is rejected
outright by Ho, encouraging contrasting readings of the works by the audience unencumbered
by authorship.
4x4’s utopian impulse to propagate these works into the Singaporean consciousness—building a
virtual community of shared knowledge—as well as to promote his artist colleagues and influences,
can also be viewed in relation to a broader system of artistic collectivity. The role of artists’
collectives and collaborations has been crucial to the development of Singaporean contemporary
art practice, as elsewhere, arising in part as a response to the absence of a strong and supportive
critical and institutional framework. With a few key exceptions, art historical research in Singapore
has largely been borne by artists themselves, documenting, archiving and writing about the
practices of their peers.4 It was perhaps with a tongue in his cheek that Ho put together the forum
consisting of art historians, critics and curators who over the past decade or more have been closely
engaged with contemporary art in Singapore.5 The forum formalised the discursiveness at the
heart of 4x4, bringing to attention the rituals of artistic debate while providing the opportunity
to extend the ideas proposed in the episodes. Watched over by the artist from the hidden vantage
point of the sound mixing booth, the panel participants represented an official or institutional
history, separated from the artists in the audience.6 It didn’t occur to me until later that this was
a humorous gesture, performed in the Substation’s theatre, with the participants acting out their
roles as Ho directed from above.
Notes
1
Thomas Crow, ‘Unwritten Histories of Conceptual Art: Against Visual Culture’, in Crow, New Haven and London:
Modern Art in the Common Culture, Yale University Press, 1996: 212
2
See Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, New York: Oxford University Press, 1973
3
Ho Tzu Nyen, email correspondence with the author, 31 January 2006
4
These could include the archive projects of Koh Nguang How, the Women in the Arts network convened by Amanda
Heng and others, the research projects and residencies organised by the artist-run space p-10, the Bali Project
undertaken by Ho and other members of The Artists Village and the art journal Vehicle published by the artist-run
space Plastique Kinetic Worms
5
The list of forum participants is listed by Lee Weng Choy in his text elsewhere in this issue
6
Cheo Chai Hiang pointed out at the forum that there were no artists on the panel, although Ray Langenbach replied
that he worked as an artist
Opposite page: Ho Tzu Nyen, still from Episode 1, 4X4—Episodes of Singapore Art, 2005
Above: Ho Tzu Nyen, still from Episode 2, 4X4—Episodes of Singapore Art, 2005
Below: Ho Tzu Nyen, still from Episode 4, 4X4—Episodes of Singapore Art, 2005
Photos ourtesy the artist

In his use of television, Ho pursues his interest in working through the problems and limits of
specific mediums. For the episodes on Tang and Lim in particular, his scripts discuss the use of
photography, hype, gossip and publicity as means of disseminating particular art works, all crucial
aspects of television broadcasting and the mass media in general. The motif of the television set
as frame is also dominant in Lim’s episode as it discusses the ‘invisible’ art work that requires
such forums to exist. By broadcasting these four works as television, Ho thus attempts to retain
a certain fidelity to their spirit and intention, at the same time as critiquing the conventions and
expectations of the form. The other side of television of course is its audience, and Ho’s use of Arts
Central to reach beyond the gallery certainly continues the legacy of conceptual art in its desire to
break free of the art system and find new forms of circulation and distribution. The ‘success’ of this
enterprise, as with the conceptual art of the 1960s and ’70s, is debatable; at the forum for example,
it became evident that few of its predominantly art-world audience had actually seen the episodes,
and its overall viewer figures were relatively low. Yet the fact that such innovative and ambitious
programs were funded, produced and transmitted at all is testament to the skills of the artist and
his team in negotiating with State and media officials and maximising available opportunities, a
process with clear parallels to Lim’s experiments in bureaucracy and administration.