How Asia's Cultural Memories And Political Narratives Are Constructed!

Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen's videos and installations weave together fact and myth, investigating how Asia's cultural memories and political narratives are constructed. He explains to Y-JEAN MUN-DELSALLE his research-driven process in the creation of new alternate histories.

- Y-Jean Mun-Delsall

The earliest documented sighting of a tiger in Singapore was in 1831. It reported that a Chinese national had been killed by one. The island’s lush virgin jungles were home to prey like pigs and deer, thus making them ideal hunting grounds for tigers. Known to be excellent swimmers, they had swum across the Strait of Johor into Singapore. When vast forests were cleared to make way for roads and plantations, tiger attacks became so common that they were rumoured to claim one life per day by the mid19th century. The government subsequently offered financial rewards for every tiger killed, eventually driving them to extinction. The last wild tiger, spotted in Choa Chu Kang, was shot and killed in 1930.

As Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen is intrigued by the city-state’s origin story and intertwines fact and fiction to meticulously construct alternative pasts that at once create and dispel myths, it was only natural for the tiger to become a recurring theme in his oeuvre.

He first showcased the feline in his 2003 video Utama – Every Name in History is I on the mythic founding of Singapore in which Sang Nila Utama, a Srivijayan prince from Palembang, landed on its shores in 1299 and named it “Singapura” (meaning “Lion City”), after an animal, he spotted while hunting, most probably mistaking a tiger for a lion. Tzu Nyen’s 2017 installation One or Several Tigers, inspired by Heinrich Leutemann’s print of Irish architect George Coleman, who was attacked by a tiger while conducting a road survey, also features images of weretigers and Indian convicts, sometimes victims of tigers, forced to construct colonial buildings.