Ho Tzu Nyen’s latest project, Night Charades, will loom large over Hong Kong harbor during Art Week. Marking the fourth year M+ has collaborated with Art Basel, supported by UBS, to activate the M+ Facade, Night Charades features animated characters miming classic scenes from the Golden Age of Hong Kong cinema and reinterpreting legendary performances by actors Leslie Cheung, Maggie Cheung, Stephen Chow, Brigitte Lin, Anita Mui, and Chow Yun-fat. Rendered in striking, theatrical lighting reminiscent of Baroque chiaroscuro painting and glossy contemporary advertising, the animation offers both familiarity for those who, like Ho, grew up with these movies, and a captivating spectacle for uninitiated audiences. Constantly reshuffled by an algorithm to create new combinations of characters and scenes, the work will offer a non-linear reinterpretation of the city’s film legacy, highlighting its porosity, fluidity, and lasting creative impact.

In this interview, conducted by Ariadne Long, M+ Assistant Curator, Visual Art, and Silke Schmickl, CHANEL Lead Curator, Moving Image, Ho delves into his thinking behind the piece.

What was your inspiration behind the new commission Night Charades?

The night sky in Hong Kong; the night lights and their reflections off the water; this gigantic screen transmitting silently to this great city, which has served as the backdrop to so many of my cinematic reveries since childhood: these are what led me to this idea of re-enacting some of these scenes from Hong Kong cinema and transmitting them back to the city. The absence of a soundtrack, due to the format of the work, led me to the idea of charades. I am intrigued by the notion of transforming a game that is usually played within the confines of a home into something not only extremely public but also distantly familiar yet alien.

Can you describe the process of the making of the work?

Night Charades is made up of around 50 scenes, gestures, and poses from Hong Kong cinema that have been seared most deeply in my mind and in the minds of a few friends and collaborators who have also grown up with these films. When a collective mentions the same scenes from the same movies, that is when you know you’ve arrived at something iconic, even archetypal. The next step was to break each scene down to its smallest unit, which we would then input into a variety of different AI systems to dream them up in new forms. What we see in Night Charades is the AI systems’ understandings and transfigurations of these cinematic scenes. These are charades that are literally performed by AI systems.

How was producing a work for the M+ Facade, one of the world’s largest public screens, different from making a work for a gallery space or cinema?

The scale of this screen makes the images architectural: they have become so large that they somehow feel closer to the condition of being pure light, akin to the night lights of the city transmitted into the atmosphere. Compared to the intimacy of a gallery space or cinema, this public screen will form part of the city’s backdrop, silently energizing it without demanding attention – like a prayer or a nightly ritual played out for everyone and no one.

Tell us more about your ongoing interest in new technologies when creating moving-image works.

How an image is transmitted has always been as important to me as what it transmits: the process is as critical as the content and the form. My engagement with new tools often begins with an inquiry into the histories of their development, before leading to questions about their limitations. These questions are transformed into a set of parameters that I can use to engage with the programmers and animators that I collaborate with.

The work’s algorithm-driven, real-time editing process keeps it from becoming static. Can you speak to variation and unpredictability in your work and how it echoes your interest in the unknown?

My greatest interest in algorithmic systems is their capacity to generate a multiplicity of versions and outcomes. In traditional filmmaking, there is a privileging of decisiveness in the selection of one perfect instance. But I’ve become increasingly troubled by the cruelty of the decision-making process that lies in filmmaking – the selection of that one perfect angle, that one perfect moment, that one perfect shot to be placed in that one perfect sequence to obtain that one perfect timeline. The final result is that one perfect film by that one singular auteur. However, what interests me, at this moment, is no longer this search for the ‘one’, but rather how we can create a system that can continuously generate multiple versions of itself, and how this multiplicity can be shaped, as form. This process is not entirely random but, rather, a composition of large aggregates of possibilities like the vectorial shapes of a swarm or a cloud.

Hong Kong cinema of the 1980s and 1990s has had a huge influence on your artistic practice, as well as on a whole generation of Asian artists and filmmakers. Can you share how you came to know about it in Singapore and what fascinated you when you watched these films? Are there any anecdotes that you would like to share?

Hong Kong cinema, along with Hong Kong television series and Cantopop, was like the air we breathed. As far back as I can remember, these were a part of my family’s life. New releases by Tsui Hark, the Hui brothers, and John Woo, as well as new instalments of the ‘Mr. Vampire’ series [1985–1992], were family affairs. I grew up watching a lot of Hollywood films – and Japanese popular culture also had a profound effect on me – but Hong Kong films were different in their closeness and even intimacy to someone with my specific upbringing. In hindsight, it was interesting and inspiring to see how many of these Hong Kong filmmakers were able to adopt Western techniques and genres while also absorbing and transfiguring them.

In your earlier work The Nameless (2015), which is in the M+ Collection, you used found footage of Hong Kong actor Tony Leung to illustrate your research on Lai Teck, an enigmatic political figure and triple agent during the Cold War. In Night Charades, you create a series of enigmatic figures through the transfiguration of well-known film characters who encounter each other in a futuristic Star Trek ‘holodeck’. Can you speak about these visual shifts and your interest in these unexpected, partly uncontrolled combinations?

Re-using and re-making are indeed strategies I deployed in both The Nameless and Night Charades. In a sense, I am a kind of ‘found object’ artist. But the ‘found objects’ are not just the original films I work with; they are also the audience’s memories and experiences of the materials. For me, what is critical in such processes is also a form of ‘estrangement’ – or ‘making strange’ – in their usage. In the case of The Nameless, this came through the deployment of Leung’s incredible filmography into a story about a real-life triple agent from Singaporean and Malayan history. In the case of Night Charades, this ‘estrangement’ comes from the attempt to recreate scenes from historic Hong Kong cinema with AI-generated characters, who may be Hong Kongers from the future or, perhaps, a parallel universe.

Time plays a critical role in your work, including in Night Charades. During the planning stage of the project, we had long discussions about how societies get stuck in ‘the sanctuary’ of nostalgia, whereas a critical and active approach to history may be much more effective, especially in tense sociopolitical moments. Can you speak about this aspect in relation to this commission?

On my last trip to Hong Kong, I visited several exhibitions dedicated to different aspects of the city’s popular culture. I was struck by how much of Hong Kong cinema and Cantopop was described as having its ‘Golden Age’ in the 1980s and 1990s. Of course, I can understand why they are labelled as such, but this way of attributing an unsurpassable peak to past achievements nevertheless troubles me. Naturally, I do not think that the commission has the capacity, nor was it my intention, to critique and much less to overcome this idea of the ‘Golden Age’. But I do think this sentiment influenced my decision to set this charade in an imagined future or parallel world.

History and film both offer productive terrain for speculative, time-based experiences. Is this one of the reasons why you express your historical research through a time-based media? What interests you in this analogy?

Indeed, sometimes I think time is the true medium with which I work. History, along with film and other forms of moving images, is simply one of the modes in which time is manifested. Every historical account, for example, relies upon certain assumptions of what time is, even if these assumptions are seldom, if ever, spelt out. Each historical account, like each film, manifests a particular shape of time or a form.

Sound is an important aspect of your work. How did you approach the idea of musicality for a soundless screen?

This absence of sound was certainly one of the biggest initial challenges for me, but it was also what made this commission so exciting. In many of my previous video installations, I considered the element of sound to be, at the very least, just as important as the image. In a way, images are like the flesh, animated by the audio, which is like the soul. But, during the process of thinking and working through Night Charades, I realized that what attracted me to the world of sound was not a specific sound per se, but rather the shapes formed by a series of sounds in sequence. And these shapes of time, or rhythmic forms, can be generated without the use of sound itself. A silent musicality can be embodied in the slowed-down motion of the AI-generated charade players and, very importantly, the effects of this motion upon the sculpted folds of their intensely pleated costumes. In this, I was greatly inspired by the master painters of draperies and folds, such as Caravaggio, Paul Cézanne, and Paolo Veronese.

You are creating a gallery version of Night Charades – what kind of soundtrack are you planning for the work? Will the sound follow the randomized editing of the visuals?

I imagine each scene and each gesture to be accompanied by two sounds at once; a sound from the past, derived from the original materials, and a new sound created in the present. The past persists, the present exists, and the future insists.