Ho Tzu Nyen shares his ‹Night March of Hundred Monsters› with the Korean audience, which deals with the complex post-colonial history and spiritual legacy in Southeast Asia.
In this work, a group of monsters appearing in Japanese folklore marches through the darkness of night. Among the hundreds of bizarre yet humorous monsters appear historical figures of Japan involved in the occupation of the Malay Peninsula during WWII, along with soldiers, spies and thinkers who have remained in darkness. As Francisco Goya said, the sleep of reason produces monsters - who are freely roaming inside the imaginary world of animation film and comics today, perhaps waiting for a crack to appear in our world again.

Translation: Lee Kyounghoo
Video Editing: Song Hamin

Ho Tzu Nyen’s investigative explorations in history, deeply engraved in his artistic works, brings to the realm of art not only historical facts but also myths and fantasies that are intermingled with history. Spanning over documentary, essay, found footage, animation, and virtual reality, among other channels of moving images, Ho’s works embrace diverse techniques and tools of history-writing, playing with and placing under his scrutiny legends, icons, films, and other varying narrative forms. To the channels through which collective memories are formed and transmitted, he remains both critically distant as a scholar and sensibly involved as an artist. What he manages to unearth from the layers of historical artefacts in Southeast Asia is a kind of innate heterogeneity. Recognizing history as the present progressive form rather than stiff fossils from the past, Ho reinvents the modes of history-writing and performatively activates, not simply observes, the dynamic relations intervening in historical discourses.

Past Works

• 2015, Asia Culture Center Theater Opening Festival ‹Ten Thousand Tigers›
• 2018, MMCA Performing Arts Asia Focus ‹The Mysterious Lai Teck›
• 2020, Ob/Scene Festival ‹No Man II›
• 2021, Ob/Scene Festival ‹R for Resonance›