Pleased to share Ho Tzu Nyen’s presentation in the group exhibition, ‘Muses, Yu Gong and Compasses’ at Pingshan Art Museum, Shenzhen, China. In the 2010 film of Mnemosyne, African British artist John Akomfrah composes a “sad song” about migration and travel, memory and mourning, knowledge and identity, nature and politics, following the poetic path laid out by Dante, Beckett, Emily Dickinson, James Joyce, Milton, Nietzsche, Shakespeare, Sophocles, and Dylan Thomas, etc. ‘Muses, Yu Gong and Compasses’ composed a profound fable born out of myths, legends and magic with an aim to continue this imaginative and narrative path.

On view is Tzu’s ‘The Cloud of Unknowing’ (2011). Inspired by ‘A Theory of Cloud: Toward a History of Painting’ written by art historian Hubert Damisch, Ho takes classic artworks of Caravaggio, Zurbarán, Correggio, Bernini, Mantegna, René Magritte and others as the blueprint, depicting the protagonist in each section as clouds, boundless and flexible, yet interwoven with love and hatred, good and evil, as well as other absurd, bizarre and compelling emotions and experiences.