An artist from Singapore — often called the most “Western” of Asian countries — arrives at the Bozar art centre in Brussels with his original art-philosophical project about time and power, from 5 February 2026. Ho Tzu Nyen and his Universe. The city-state of Singapore is a pragmatic hybrid built on the formula “Asian values plus Western institutions”. It produces talents such as Ho Tzu Nyen, who in his first solo exhibition freely quotes Rainer Maria Rilke and Spinoza just as easily as Eastern philosophers. This makes his project accessible to a European audience.

In 2012, the artist began creating a vast Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia. His research proposes defining one aspect of Southeast Asian culture through each of the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet (G for gong, P for paddy field, T for tiger, and so on). At the exhibition he presents the letter T — (time) — and his most recent entry in the dictionary: P — (power).

Let’s not overload our minds with the technical details and algorithms Ho Tzu Nyen uses; they can obscure the ideas.

So, “time” — across different centuries and cultures it has been perceived in different ways: linear, cyclical, sacred… As in the old phrase, “five minutes of a kiss is too short, but five minutes on a hot stove is an eternity.” Combining found imagery and animated films, the artist weaves together references and anecdotes linked to the concept of time. Different experiences and notions of time intertwine — everyday stories drawn from the artist’s personal circle, philosophical and cosmological reflections, ideas from quantum physics, and historical facts illustrating the evolution of time measurement in both Asia and Europe.

Forty-three screens form a constellation of images and videos that make up the installation Time Pieces. They function as preparatory notes for T-time. Varied in form and size, they gather Ho’s initial thoughts on time and embody different images of the concept: symbols of time, real instruments for measuring time, references to cultural history, and even temporal scales specific to the Solar System or to plant and animal life. Some videos last a second, others run in cycles of up to 24 hours. Some are synchronised with the moment of our viewing, while others, displaying local time in real time, extend towards theoretical infinity.

Speaking about time, Ho cites the Japanese philosopher Tsuzuki Shūzō (1886–1941), from a lecture he gave in Kyoto in 1930 about a hero of Greek mythology: “Constant returning and departing in the circle of life and death is not necessarily suffering. Sisyphus is not necessarily condemned to hell. Subjective attitude determines everything. Why should eternal reincarnation be a misfortune? Why should the necessity of repeating the same thing endlessly be a punishment? Everything depends on Sisyphus’s subjective attitude. His good will — the will, firm and confident, always to begin again, always to roll the stone — finds in this very repetition an entire system of morality and, consequently, all its happiness.”

In the new work created especially for this exhibition, entitled “P – Power”, Ho Tzu Nyen adds a new entry to his ongoing Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia. He delves into diverse notions of power: from political and religious authority to the power of natural evolution, and then explores such fundamental themes as democracy, history, the evolution of technology, capitalism and colonialism. Ho sees Power much like Time: an unfathomable universal concept that we struggle to define.

The video installation consists of chapters edited in real time, based on video materials found online and subsequently transformed. Each chapter is connected to a dialogue between Ho Tzu Nyen and an AI chatbot about what power might be. Drawing on animist ideas from various Southeast Asian cultures, Ho is also deeply inspired by the concept of power as defined by the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677): not as domination, but as the capacity to affect and to be affected. Power is that which continues to vibrate through time; it is that which touches the senses. As Ho puts it: “Power not as domination, but as endurance, consistency, coherence through time.”

I was particularly struck by the artist’s idea about the difference in how “power” is understood by Europeans and Asians. A representative of Western civilisation tends to conceive of it as an abstract phenomenon; for his Eastern counterpart or interlocutor, it is a substance that is almost tangible — a kind of concentrated energy which the people, as a rule, delegate to a strong leader. Therefore, Ho Tzu Nyen argues (and he is not alone in this view), the East has traditionally had more despotisms and, in the present day, more dictatorships. For a Western person, “power” is the delegation of authority to one of us — perhaps someone more educated — but without this notion of a special, quasi-material substance.