The roar of the past

On display at Singapore Art Museum (SAM), “Time & The Tiger” is a captivating mid-career retrospective by renowned Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen. Ho is a visual artist, writer, theatre director and filmmaker whose practice challenges conventional hierarchies and people’s understanding of the past.

The exhibition “Time & The Tiger” offers a glimpse into what inspires Ho’s art: his fascination with how tigers migrated across Asia over time. With glacial shifts and rising sea levels over 2 million years, tigers went from roaming freely across Asia to near extinction today. Tigers symbolised power during Japan’s invasion of Southeast and East Asia, and the Malay weretigers connected humans to ancestral memory. For Ho, time is a multi-dimensional matrix, shaped and reshaped by cultural, ecological and historical forces where the tiger serves as a powerful symbol of…