Daily Practice: Ho Tzu Nyen

Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen is something of a time traveller. Fluidity lies at the core of Ho’s cinematic time-based language, where multimedia installations navigate history as entangled and ever-changing: a condition that relates to the artist’s conceptual relationship with time and place. Consider Utama—Every Name in History is I (2003), a video that collapses the figure of prince Sang Nila Utama, said to have founded the kingdom of Singapura at the cusp of the 14th century, with explorers and colonisers like Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama, Zheng He, and Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles. Ho’s ongoing algorithmic software-based multimedia project, The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia, anchors the artist’s approach to history through an interrogation of the regional term for Southeast Asia first used by the Allied Forces during the Second World War. Initiated during a residency with Asia Art Archive in 2017, an online platform collating images and videos sourced online, alongside vocals written and performed by Singaporean musician Bani Haykal and a score by Japanese musician and field recordist Yasuhiro Morinaga, the project is categorised according to concepts drawn from the letters of the English alphabet, including “ghost” and “tiger.”

More recently, the artist has engaged with Artificial Intelligence (AI). Commissioned by M+ and Art Basel, Night Charades (2025) is an AI-generated animation based on an iconic era in Hong Kong cinema—defined by the films of Wong Kar-wai, John Woo, Wong Jing and Tsui Hark, among others—with AI-generated actors re-enacting roles performed by icons including Leslie Cheung and Anita Mui. Based on these recent developments, Ho invited ChatGPT to map out his Daily Practice. The result is a reflection of the artist’s life as observed through one of his chosen tools.

When you wake up and begin your day, which direction do you naturally walk towards first and why?

You don’t move first toward a physical direction so much as toward a problem-space. There’s a tendency to re-enter an unfinished structure—a text, a system (like P for Power), a staging problem.

Your “direction” is recursive: you return to something already in motion.

Does your day naturally divide into phases, such as morning, afternoon, and evening? How does the rhythm and energy of these phases affect your creativity and focus?

Your day does divide, but not conventionally:

Your energy moves from precision → accumulation → projection.

Do you have any small routines or actions–like a personal ritual or quiet signal–that help activate your creativity each day?

You don’t rely on fixed rituals. Instead, you use constraints as activation signals:

Constraint is your ritual. It triggers movement.

Where do you work, and what does that space need for you to feel focused

Your workspace is less physical than diagrammatic:

What you need is not just quiet or tools, but a system that can be reconfigured continuously.

Is there an aspect of your everyday life, beyond art and culture, that significantly yet quietly shapes your artistic practice?

History—but not as content.
Rather, history as a field of forces that persist and mutate.

Also:

These quietly shape how you think about power and change.

What tools, objects, or materials hold meaning for you, even if you don’t use them in your work?

Not objects in the traditional sense, but:

They matter not as artifacts but as operators of transformation.

How do you handle moments of block, fatigue, or disconnection?

You rarely stop — instead you shift scale or operation:

Block becomes a signal to change the mode of engagement, not to pause.

What do you notice in the quiet moments?

You notice:

There is a sensitivity to what continues vibrating, rather than what is resolved.

At the end of each day, what feelings, images, thoughts, or questions stay with you?

What stays with you are not conclusions but:

Also: a persistent question of how to give form to practice itself.

As observed of Tzu by his “AI” platform.

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Daily Practice invites art-world creatives to share the habits and rituals that sustain their creative lives, with questions written by artist John Clang, whose practice adopts the ancient Chinese divinatory art of zi wei dou shu.