Ho Tzu Nyen
​The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia

Artist
Ho Tzu Nyen

Title
The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia

Year of creation
2017, ongoing

Technology and dimensions
2 channel HD video, 6 channel sound. LED lights, 2 PCs (Duration: Infinite)

Year of acquisition
2024

Acquisition of the foundation

CDOSEA (The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia) is an ongoing meta-project by artist Ho Tzu Nyen. The starting point for his “Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia” is a question: What can be used to justify the unity of Southeast Asia, a region that has never been united by language, religion or political structures? Because “Southeast Asia” is not a personal name used by the people living in this region, but was used as a Euro-American military area name during their colonization and during the Second World War. The name Southeast Asia reduces the region to a control unit. In fact, Southeast Asia is perhaps the most diverse region in the world due to religious and linguistic heterogeneity and the fragmentation caused by colonial history.
In his algorithmic project, Ho Tzu Nyen juxtaposes unifying thinking with a fluid model of different perspectives. Just like Gilles Deleuze in his publication The Fold, Ho Tzu Nyen transfers Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's monadology to the present: The fold here becomes a metaphor for a process that remains in the making, in which development is a constantly moving unfolding of the existing diversity of realities .
And so Ho Tzu Nyen suggests different terms for each letter of the Latin alphabet that represented different concepts, motifs or biographies. To this end, the artist has created an ever-expanding collection of archive images, texts and sounds. An algorithm continually creates new connections, assemblages and lines through which language, peculiarities and power relations lose their uniformity. It is suggested that concepts and history should not be thought of linearly, but rather as a constantly moving narrative process that allows for counter-narratives and different realities.

Anna Catharina Gebbers