The origin tale of modern Singapore cultivates the image of a gleaming city rising from the wilderness – most recently rehashed in a certain hit film that makes a glib reference to the island being nothing but ‘jungle and pig farms’ before Chinese immigrants arrived, clearing the landscape and making themselves ‘crazy rich’ in the process. In this story, tigers are the antagonist, a feral threat it was impossible to eliminate completely: Singapore is an island, and tigers are excellent swimmers. As late as 1869, Alfred Russel Wallace wrote, in The Malay Archipelago, that ‘there are always a few tigers roaming about Singapore, and they kill, on average, a Chinaman every day’.
Given his fascination with national myth-making and the stories we tell about ourselves, it is unsurprising that the tiger became a totem for the Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen. He first took on the big cat in 2003 with Utama – Every Name in History Is I, inspired by the granddaddy of them all: the tiger that gave Singapore its name, albeit through a case of mistaken identity. Legend has it that when Sang Nila Utama, a prince of the Srivijaya Empire, landed on the island in the 13th century, he named the settlement he founded Singapura, ‘Lion City’, after an animal he spotted while hunting and took to be a good omen. Lions were never native to Singapore, however, and many historians believe it might, in fact, have been a tiger.
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Ho Tzu Nyen, One or Several Tigers, 2017, video still. Courtesy: the artist and Edouard Malingue Gallery, Hong Kong and Shanghai
Ho’s recent installation, One or Several Tigers (2017), the last in his ‘Tigers’ series (2012–17), draws inspiration from Heinrich Leutemann’s print Unterbrochene Straßenmessung auf Singapore (Interrupted Road Surveying in Singapore, 1835), which documents an incident from that year. George Drumgoole Coleman, the Irish architect responsible for the planning and building of much of colonial Singapore, was attacked by a tiger while carrying out a road survey. He survived, although his theodolite did not.
On facing screens, CGI versions of Coleman and the tiger drift by, while a voice narrates their encounter. ‘Surveyor and tiger,’ it intones, ‘civilization and wilderness/ order and chaos/ came face to face/ in that instant/ time is suspended.’ The languid, hypnotic vocals are in sharp contrast to the deadpan surrealism of the visuals. At one point, a tiger drifts through the void, expanding like a balloon until it is large enough to block out the sun. We are beyond time and space, and the tiger manages to be at once historical, prehistoric and eternal.
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Ho Tzu Nyen, One or Several Tigers, 2017, video still. Courtesy: the artist and Edouard Malingue Gallery, Hong Kong and Shanghai
Ho is very taken with the Malay harimau jadian, or weretiger. In the video, a human face slowly transforms into a tiger, profoundly unsettling but also weirdly familiar if you were ever a fan of the ‘Animorphs’ series of children’s sci-fi books (1996–2001). The tiger chants, ‘Weretigers, we’re tigers,’ though the semantic difference is only discernible in the captioned text that appears on screen. Ho says his ‘interest in the tiger stems from the fact that it is always already enmeshed within the human, that these two species were already folded into each other’. Evidence suggests that early humans chose to settle on the edges of the jungle, where tigers were prevalent.
The rest of the video is a loose survey of tigers throughout Singapore’s past, incorporating shadow puppets, live performance and found images and taking in figures such as the ‘Tiger of Malaya’, Tomoyuki Yamashita: the Japanese general responsible for the fall of Singapore. Towards the end of this tapestry, we are introduced to the Indian convicts who were forced to construct the buildings that Coleman and others designed, who were sometimes victims of marauding tigers. The injustices of the colonial prison system are dispassionately laid out as the camera returns to Leutemann’s engraving, focusing not on Coleman but on the dark-skinned bodies surrounding him: his entourage of Indian labourers. Of course, even if they managed to survive, these workers went otherwise unmemorialized, whilst the street and bridge named after Coleman still stand in Singapore today. (Almost 200 years later, the aforementioned film has drawn criticism for featuring an all-Chinese main cast of wealthy protagonists, while its darker-skinned characters are relegated to positions of servility. Plus ça change.)
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Ho Tzu Nyen, One or Several Tigers, 2017, video still. Courtesy: the artist and Edouard Malingue Gallery, Hong Kong and Shanghai
One or Several Tigers embodies the utmost solemnity of religious ritual in every utterance, and in the gravity of the whole enterprise. This has a lot to do with duration: with a work like this, the only possible response is to surrender yourself to it, to slow down your rhythms and accept its pace. This quasi-spirituality continues a sensibility from Utama, which begins with Old Testament pastiche (‘In the beginning of Singapore, there was him,’) and ends with a parade of gods in trishaws paying a visit to the merlion, a ‘mythical’ creature invented by the Singapore Tourism Board in 1964.
As a Singaporean writer with an interest in imperialism and an overdeveloped sense of whimsy, I am very much the target audience for an installation in which an anthropomorphic tiger recites gobbets of the country’s colonial history. This wasn’t a frivolous exercise, though; despite the deft sense of absurdity at work here, I also felt something akin to awe. ‘Like the human,’ Ho notes, the tiger ‘is an apex predator’. Behind the gleaming facade of Singapore, he suggests, the tiger never went away and, if we look hard enough in the city and in ourselves, there it will be.
Main image: Ho Tzu Nyen, One or Several Tigers, 2017, video still. Courtesy: the artist and Edouard Malingue Gallery, Hong Kong and Shanghai
Published in frieze, issue 199, November/December 2018, with the title ‘One Take: Tiger, Tiger’.
Jeremy Tiang is a writer based in New York, USA. His debut novel, State of Emergency (2017), won the 2018 Singapore Literature Prize for English fiction.
First published in Issue 199
HO TZU NYYN，一个或几个老虎，2017，视频仍然。礼貌：艺术家和爱德华马林格画廊，香港和上海HO是非常与马来哈里摩JADEN，或Weligig.在视频中，一个人的脸慢慢变成老虎，非常令人不安，但也奇怪的熟悉，如果你曾经是一个球迷的“动画”系列儿童科幻书籍（1996 – 2001）。老虎叫喊“Weligges，我们是老虎”，虽然语义差异只能在屏幕上出现的字幕文本中辨认出来。Ho说，他对老虎的兴趣源于它一直在人类内部，这两个物种已经互相折叠。有证据表明早期人类选择定居在丛林的边缘，那里老虎很盛行。视频的其余部分是对新加坡过去的老虎进行的松散的调查，包括影木偶、现场表演和发现的图像，并拍摄诸如“马来亚老虎”的图像，Tomoyuki Yamashita：日本将军负责新加坡的坠落。在这幅挂毯的末尾，我们介绍一些印度囚犯，他们被迫建造了科尔曼和其他人设计的建筑，这些建筑有时是劫掠老虎的受害者。当摄影机回到Leutemann的雕刻时，殖民监狱系统的不公正被冷静地摆了出来，焦点不是科尔曼，而是他周围的黑皮肤的尸体：他的印度劳工随从。当然，即使他们设法幸存下来，这些工人还是没有得到纪念，而以科尔曼命名的街道和桥梁今天仍然屹立在新加坡。（将近200年后，上述电影因为主角都是中国富豪而受到批评，而深肤色的人物则沦为奴仆。）加上a变化)tn11_cmyk.jpg Ho Tszu Nyen，一个或几个老虎，2017年，视频。礼貌：艺术家和爱德华马林格画廊，香港和上海一个或几个老虎体现了最大的庄严宗教仪式在每一个发言，并在整个企业的重力。这和持续时间有很大关系：对于像这样的工作，唯一可能的反应就是屈服于它，放慢你的节奏，接受它的节奏。这种准灵性延续了犹他州人的情感，从旧约的牧歌开始（“在新加坡的开始，有他”），最后是一群三肖神祗游行，拜访鱼尾狮，这是新加坡旅游局在1日发明的“神话”生物。964。作为一名对帝国主义有兴趣的新加坡作家，我有一种过度发展的异想天开的感觉，我是这部小说的目标观众。虽然这不是一个轻浮的运动，尽管在这里工作的巧妙的荒谬感，我也感觉到类似于敬畏的东西。“就像人类一样，”老虎说，“老虎是一个顶端捕食者”。他暗示，在新加坡闪闪发光的外表背后，老虎从未离去，如果我们在城里和自己身上都看得足够仔细，它就会出现。主要图像：Ho Tzu Nyen，一个或几个老虎，2017，视频仍然。礼貌：艺术家和爱德华马林格画廊，香港和上海出版，在FRIEZE，发行199，十一月/ 2018年12月，标题为“一取：虎，虎”。杰瑞米Tiang杰瑞米Tiang.美国纽约的一位作家。他的处女作《紧急状态》（2017年）获得了2018年新加坡英语小说文学奖。《199期》第一期刊登于《199期11月至12月》专题/《何子年电影》爱德华·马林格画廊FRIZE特稿 ARThing编译
