Ho Tzu Nyen Rethinks Time in the Age of AI

What is the purpose of telling time? For millennia, people have used sundials to observe the length of the day and, by extension, the rhythms of labour and sleep. According to Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen, accurate timekeeping was crucial in medieval Chinese society. Yet ‘Zhezong, a Song Chinese emperor, was interested in cosmic [time], not our mundane time,’ Ho explained during a press tour of his latest exhibition. Transcending the ordinary is precisely what the multimedia artist attempts in ‘2 stories: voids & times’, at neugerriemschneider in Berlin. Here, Ho is focused less on measuring moments than on folding them: bending chronology, manipulating space and reviving contested histories through technology. 

The show opens with Voice of Void (2021), an expansive two-room installation offering a direct confrontation with Japanese philosophy, imperialism and incarceration. Ho’s virtual reality-assisted film revisits the Kyoto School, a group of early 20th-century philosophers who sought to critique Eurocentric thought and foster new intellectual traditions within an East Asian framework. Projected across six screens, the piece recreates the secret November 1941 symposium ‘The World-Historical Standpoint and Japan’ – a contentious meeting that provided intellectual support for attacks against the US and China during World War II. The narrative unfolds through three interconnected spaces – a tea room, an aerial ‘Sky Room’ populated by science-fiction robots and a prison – each merging into the next.

During the 1930s and 1940s, the Japanese military’s systematic persecution of political dissidents led to the imprisonment of several Kyoto School members, which Ho depicts in the installation. In the tea room, however, avatars of Keiji Nishitani, Masaaki Kōsaka, Iwao Kōyama and Shigetaka Suzuki now debate philosopher Kitarō Nishida’s principles of ‘nothingness’ and German general Erich Ludendorff’s conception of ‘total war’. Rather than focusing on the group’s controversial reception, Ho fractures the timeline through the Sky Room while recreating the carceral sites where these intellectuals operated. Juxtaposing the abstraction of philosophy with the violence of empire, he reveals how the seemingly civil and serene environment of a tea room could also be a prelude to atrocity.

Voice of Void raises questions about war while allowing the audience to engage directly with discourse and combat. Wearing VR goggles and headphones, the viewer lies on a tatami mat, immersed in these speculative reconstructions. Depending on their position, they may hear whispered introductions to the school’s approaches; at one point, listening to the isolated, calm voices in the Sky Room, I felt like a warrior spiralling across the firmament. The sensory stimulation feels intentionally unstable, distorting one’s sense of time and moral distance.

In the adjoining gallery, T for Time: Timepieces (2023–ongoing) extends Ho’s fascination with temporal perception. Viewers enter a dark room filled with 43 looping videos, ranging from several seconds to 24 hours long. Whether through a pulsating heart or sand slowly flowing through an hourglass, each animation explores different forms of timekeeping. The visual abundance might seem overwhelming at first, but subtler resonances are revealed when focusing on individual channels, such as Sisyphus I, in which a figure enacts the mythical king’s famous punishment: once it reaches the top, it rolls back down, and Sisyphus must start again. According to Ho, many in the West see this endless repetition as a curse, but ‘for some East Asian cultures, repetition is bliss.’

As artists grapple with whether their practice will become irrelevant in the age of AI, it’s intriguing to see Ho treat technology as a tool rather than a threat. While techno-pessimists warn that AI could eliminate human artistry, Ho challenges this idea by producing visually stunning and immersive works through his computer generations. Conjuring scenes that are both historical and speculative, he suggests that technology might not erase human labour but reconfigure its temporality.

Ho Tzu Nyen’s ‘2 stories: voids & times’ is on view at neugerriemschneider, Berlin, until 21 March 2026

_{Main image: Ho Tzu Nyen, T for Time: Timepieces, 2023–ongoing, flatscreens (various quantities and dimensions), apps and videos, ‘2 stories: voids & times’, 2025–26. Courtesy: © Ho Tzu Nyen and neugerriemschneider, Berlin; photograph: Hans Georg Gaul}