HO TZU NYEN at Trinity Square Video (401 Richmond West #376), to March 21. 416-593-1332. Rating: NNNN
Eastern and Western culture and spirituality meet in The Cloud Of Unknowing, a haunting half-hour video by Singapore’s Ho Tzu Nyen. The original Cloud Of Unknowing was an anonymous medieval Christian guide to contemplative spirituality whose ideas bear similarities to the Eastern meditative tradition.
Ho’s installation was the Singaporean entry in the 2011 Venice Biennale, where it played in a church, but it still packs a punch of otherworldly weirdness in the less spectacular environment of Trinity Square Video.
The dreamlike video visits eight characters inhabiting a derelict apartment building. Caucasians and Asians, all have fleshy bodies that give them an amorphous, cloud-like quality.
To a soundtrack of drumming, heavy breathing and bits of song, Ho presents a long-haired rock drummer, a man with vitiligo whose room is hung with hundreds of light bulbs, another who seems to be sinking into a bed, a woman who watches a staticky TV while plates of food rot, another serene woman whose apartment has been overtaken by vegetation and a man in a book-lined study who writes obsessively. In a water-filled basement, a man who strips down to an incontinence undergarment becomes the agent of the mist that provides the climax.
The characters are supposedly drawn from art historical images. The only reference I could identify was literary rather than visual – to the light bulb room from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man – but spotting references is not the point. It’s more about taking in a series of strange, sometimes disturbing images of life, culture and decay that are open to a range of interpretations.
The Cloud Of Unknowing is memorable but not always comfortable to watch, especially in the end, when it turns immersive as a hidden smoke machine fogs up the screening room, implicating the viewer in the mysteries the video evokes.
art@nowtoronto.com
