Artist Ho Tzu Nyen joins us to present his 2019 video work Hotel Aporia, which unfolds as a relay of encounters during Japan’s interwar period. Commissioned for the Aichi Triennale, the work was first presented as a multichannel installation staged across Kirakutei, a Taisho-era inn building in Toyota City that was once a stopover for a World War II kamikaze squadron before its final flight. Overlaying the architectural setting with speculative inquiry, Ho assembles a cast of characters from this charged period in Japanese history: kamikaze pilots and their flight songs; philosophers of the Kyoto School movement; and Ryuichi Yokoyama and Yasujiro Ozu, who like many directors were assigned to the Japanese Imperial Army’s filmmaking unit (which took Ozu to Ho’s native Singapore from 1942 to 1945 for a never-completed project). The cinematic version of Hotel Aporia, which is being presented in the United States for the first time, assembles the six video channels into a recursive 84 minutes interweaving scenes from Ozu films and Yokoyama’s wartime cartoons with a heady epistolary exchange between the artist and his Japanese collaborators. Through haunting dramaturgy, Ho brings fresh perspectives to a moment in history in which nationalism, ideology, and cultural production all intersected in the project of empire.
This screening dovetails with Ho’s recent exhibition at the Hessel Museum of Art, and coincides with a new lecture-performance commissioned by the Foundation for Spirituality and the Arts being presented at Asia Art Archive in America on December 14. Special thanks to the Foundation for Spirituality and the Arts, Asia Art Archive in America, and the Jim Thompson Foundation.