Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen’s latest commission for Hong Kong’s M+ museum represents a fascinating convergence of cutting-edge AI technology with nostalgic cinema. His work “Night Charades” transforms the museum’s massive 110-metre facade into a canvas for reimagined scenes from Hong Kong’s cinematic Golden Age, using artificial intelligence to create multiple versions of iconic moments from films by directors like John Woo and Wong Kar-wai. This project exemplifies how AI tools can be harnessed to explore cultural heritage while simultaneously creating something distinctly contemporary.
The big picture: Ho’s installation continues his artistic approach of using the past to explore the future, with AI technology creating multiple versions of classic Hong Kong cinema scenes.
- The commission, supported by M+ museum, Art Basel and UBS, will be displayed from March 22 to June 29, 2025.
- By leveraging AI to render and re-render imagery, Ho creates what he describes as a “dizzying multiplicity” of variations on the original scenes.
Cultural context: Ho’s personal connection to Hong Kong cinema stems from his childhood in Singapore, where these films and TV series were enormously influential.
- The artist acknowledges how this cinema was “formative to his visual world and imagination,” making this project a natural extension of his artistic interests.
- His fascination with the concept of a “Golden Age” being positioned in the past rather than the future drives the conceptual framework of the installation.
Approach to AI: Ho treats artificial intelligence as a tool with specific capabilities and limitations, focusing on its ability to generate multiple interpretations.
- Rather than using AI simply for novelty, Ho employs it specifically for its capacity to create numerous renderings of the same cinematic scene.
- The project deliberately “resists a single narrative or timeline,” embracing the multiplicity that AI generation enables.
Why this matters: Night Charades represents a thoughtful application of AI in art that doesn’t simply showcase the technology but uses it to explore cultural memory and visual history.
- Ho suggests the work may be perfectly “dated” to our current moment—capturing both our nostalgia for past cultural touchstones and our contemporary fascination with AI’s creative capabilities.
- The installation demonstrates how AI can be used not just to create new imagery but to reexamine and recontextualize existing cultural artifacts.
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