Queensland Art Gallery - Queensland Government

Ho Tzu Nyen
Of the way of the creator
Friedrich Nietzsche’s best known work, Also Sprach Zarathustra: Ein
Buch für Alle und Keine (Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone
and No One) (1883–85), is a stirring metaphorical treatise on many of
the German philosopher’s key ideas. These include the potential of
humanity to transcend its circumstances, embodied in the figure of the
übermensch, or overman; and a rejection of the metaphysical world,
summarised in the famous phrase ‘God is dead’. Written in a neo-Biblical
style (paradoxical given Nietzsche’s criticism of Christianity), the book
features as its central character the ancient Persian prophet Zarathustra,
who descends from a mountain to teach his ideas of the overman to a
modern world without God, its people lost in a nihilistic wasteland. 1
Ho Tzu Nyen’s Zarathustra: A Film for Everyone and No One 2009 is
a condensed representation of Nietzsche’s narrative, presented as
a starkly staged video and sound piece. Produced in collaboration
with students from the film, fine arts, music, acting and musical
theatre departments at Singapore’s LASALLE College of the Arts, the
work weaves the pedagogical impulse of Nietzsche’s text — in which
Zarathustra brings his knowledge to the masses, and then leaves
them to find their own way — into its method of production. With his
philosophy of overcoming the self and building the new, Nietzsche
foregrounds creativity and, by making the film within an art school, Ho’s
work reflects on the creative act and the process of becoming an artist.
As with many of Ho’s previous works — such as the painting and video
installation Utama: Every Name in History is I 2003, the video work
The Bohemian Rhapsody Project 2006 and the theatre production The
King Lear Project 2008 — Zarathustra reworks existing cultural icons.
The soundtrack for Zarathustra features another work inspired by
Nietzsche’s book, Richard Strauss’s 1896 tone poem of the same name,
which has one of most famous opening sequences in music — in part
due to its use in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey. 2
In his ambitious adaptations of historical works, Ho also pulls apart
the medium he is using, be it painting, film, video or theatre. Drawing
attention to constituent elements such as sound, image, editing and
staging, he lays bare conventions and processes, as well as making
connections to other histories and art forms.
the mechanics of the video’s production in full view. The narrative of
Nietzsche’s book may be unfamiliar to some, but Strauss’s music is
immediately recognisable, most likely associated with Kubrick’s aligning
planets. In a sense, Ho’s work returns it to its original inspiration — the
rising of the sun, and the descent of Zarathustra from the mountain.
Complex and self-reflexive, Ho Tzu Nyen’s works are driven by a
palpable passion for his material and a strong sense of humour. While
iconic, many of his source texts are somewhat flawed: unfinished,
overreaching, or incomprehensible. Nietzsche’s book is all three —
Harold Bloom refers to it as a ‘gorgeous disaster’ 4 — and its excesses
reflect the philosopher’s fragile constitution and intensity of feeling.
As translator RJ Hollingdale wrote:
. . . unlike most people, even most philosophers, Nietzsche lived
with his intellectual problems as with realities, he experienced a
similar emotional commitment to them as other men experience
to their wife and children. 5
Ideas, after all, are what make us human, and creativity propels us
forward — but no-one said it was going to be easy.
Russell Storer
Endnotes
1 Zarathustra (or Zoroaster) was a Persian prophet and poet living around 1200–1500
BCE. Following a divine vision, he rejected the polytheistic religion of his people
and preached belief in one creator God, founding Zoroastrianism, one of the
world’s earliest monotheistic faiths. Its followers today are largely in India (known
as Parsis) and Iran.
2 Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, Harper Perennial,
London, 2009, p.7.
3 See Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, Oxford University
Press, New York, 1973.
4 Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, Macmillan,
London, 1995, p.210.
5 RJ Hollingdale, ‘Introduction’, in Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A
Book for Everyone and No One, trans. RJ Hollingdale, Penguin Classics, London,
2003, p.11.
Ho Tzu Nyen
Singapore b.1976
Zarathustra: A Film for Everyone and No One
(production stills) 2009
High-definition digital video, single channel, colour,
sound, 24:30 minutes, ed. of 3 / Commissioned for APT6 /
Supported by Osage Gallery, The Puttnam School of
Film and the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore,
LASALLE College of the Arts. An initiative of the National
Arts Council’s Arts Creation Fund. / Images courtesy:
The artist and Tzulogical Films / Photographs: Olivia Kwok
An ongoing interest of Ho’s, influenced by the literary critic Harold
Bloom, is the idea of ‘misprision’, in which young artists find their
voice by creatively misreading the works of past masters, which in
turn are re-read in the light of the new. 3 His use of well-known sources
also draws on the audience’s existing images of them, who inevitably
bring these to bear on their viewing of his works. He calls this process
‘mental karaoke’, and as his deconstructed projects unfold, they move
between familiarity, which assumes coherence and understanding,
and a more destabilising fragmentation. Ho’s version of ‘Bohemian
Rhapsody’, for example, uses the lyrics of the British rock band Queen’s
song to construct a courtroom drama, with alternating lead actors and
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