Night Charades: Reimaging Hong Kong Cinema

Co-commissioned by M+ and Art Basel, and presented by UBS, Night Charades by Ho Tzu Nyen is an AI-generated animation that pays tribute to the history of Hong Kong cinema. In this interview conducted by Ariadne Long, Assistant Curator, Visual Art, and Silke Schmickl, CHANEL Lead Curator, Moving Image, Ho Tzu Nyen delves into the inspiration behind the commission, his insights among history, technology, and art.

The artist’s investigations into lesser-known Asian histories, popular culture, and his speculative approach to image making made him an ideal candidate to create an original work for the M+ Facade. When he came to Hong Kong for a site visit in the summer of 2024, he and the curators spent long moments on Victoria Harbour to experience the Facade, exchanging their thoughts on the city’s past and present. It became clear that cinema could offer a vision for the future.

What was your inspiration behind the new commission Night Charades? How did you come up with the title, and what is the significance of referencing the popular parlour game?

The night sky with the night lights and their reflections off the water; this gigantic screen transmitting silently to this great city, which has served as the backdrop of so many of my cinematic reveries since childhood—these are what led to this idea of re-enacting some of these scenes from Hong Kong cinema and transmitting them back to the city. The silence of this transmission—the absence of a soundtrack—led me to the idea of charade, which is a game as well as a performance in the warmth of a home. I am intrigued by the notion of transforming a game that is usually played within the confines of a home with friends and family into something not only extremely public but also distantly familiar yet alien.

The one question I asked and continue to ask myself is: ‘Who is this work for?’ Firstly, I think it is for the people of Hong Kong, especially the generations that lived through the 1980s and 1990s who have the same set of shared memories and cultural references. A charade, however, is a special kind of performance. It is always at least two things at once; it is the recollection of another earlier performance, while being its own performance, which can mean something else depending upon the context in which it is performed and who is watching. For some of the Hong Kong audiences, the game of charades will invoke the memories of popular variety shows that were broadcast on television.

Can you describe the process of the making of the work, from the selection of films to how the algorithm is generated? 

Night Charades is made up of around 50 scenes, gestures, and poses from Hong Kong cinema that have been seared most deeply in my mind and in the minds of a few friends and collaborators who had also grown up with these films. When a collective mentions the same scenes from the same movies—that is when you know you’ve arrived at something that is iconic, or even archetypal. The next step is to break each scene down to its smallest unit, with which we would in turn use as input into a variety of different AI systems to dream them up in new forms. What we see in Night Charades is the AI systems’ understandings and transfigurations of these cinematic scenes—these are charades that are literally performed by these AI systems.

How was making a work for the M+ Facade, one of the world’s largest public screens, different from making a work for a gallery space or cinema?

To me, the scale of this screen makes the images architectural, in the sense that these images have become so large that they somehow feel closer to the condition of being pure light, akin to the night lights of the city transmitted into the atmosphere. Compared to the intimacy and close proximity of a gallery space or the cinema, which demands concentration, this public screen is more akin to a kind of ritual of light transmitted back to the city, forming part of its ambient backdrop, silently energising it without demanding attention—a prayer, or a nightly ritual played out for everyone and no one.

Tell us more about your ongoing interest in new technologies when creating moving image works. How do you work with these tools and the programmers involved?

For me, what an image transmits has always been as important as how an image is transmitted. The process is as critical as the content and the form. For example, the moving image is capable of movement only because it is enabled by an apparatus which is technical and ideological at the same time. My engagement with new tools often begins with an inquiry into the histories of their development, before leading to questions about their limitations. These questions are transformed into a set of parameters that I can use to engage with the programmers and animators with whom I collaborate with.

Does the usage of new technology change your perception and definition of yourself as an artist?

In a strange sense, no, as I think that I’ve always had this approach regardless of the technology I engage with. Paradoxically, I would say that while the processes and the final output of my work continuously change, I’ve remained constant in my methods.

The real-time editing through an algorithm keeps the form of the work from becoming static. Can you speak about the variation and unpredictability in your work and how it responds to your interest in the unknown?

Yes, my greatest interest in algorithmic systems is their capacity to generate a multiplicity of versions and outcomes. In traditional filmmaking, there is a privileging of decisiveness in the selection of one perfect instance. But I’ve become increasingly troubled by the cruelty of decision that lies in the selection process of filmmaking—the selection of that one perfect angle, that one perfect moment, and that one perfect shot, to be placed in the one perfect sequence to obtain that perfect timeline. The final result is that one perfect film by the one singular auteur. However, what interests me, at this moment, is no longer this search for the ‘one’, but rather how we can create a system that can continuously generate multiple versions of itself, and how this multiplicity can be shaped, as form. This process is not entirely random but rather a composition of large aggregates of possibilities, like the vectorial shapes of a swarm or a cloud.

Hong Kong cinema of the 1980s and 1990s has had a huge influence on your artistic practice, as well as a whole generation of Asian artists and filmmakers. Can you share how you came to know about Hong Kong cinema in Singapore, and what fascinated you when you watched these films? Are there any anecdotes that you would like to share?

Hong Kong cinema, along with Hong Kong television series and Cantopop, was like the air we breathed. As far back as I remember, these were a part of my family’s lives. New releases by the Hui brothers, John Woo, and Tsui Hark and new instalments of the Mr Vampire series were family affairs. To this day, I believe that the film I have watched the most is probably A Chinese Ghost Story (1987) directed by Ching Siu-tung and produced by Tsui Hark. There was a time when I knew every single line of that film. While I grew up watching a lot of Hollywood films and Japanese popular culture also had a profound effect on me, Hong Kong films were different in their closeness and even intimacy to someone with my specific upbringing. In hindsight, it was interesting and inspiring to see how many of these Hong Kong filmmakers were able not only to adopt Western techniques and genres but also to absorb and transfigure them.

In your previous work, The Nameless (2015), which is in the M+ Collection, you used found footage of Hong Kong actor Tony Leung to illustrate your investigational research on Lai Teck, an enigmatic political figure and triple agent during the Cold War. In Night Charades, you create a series of enigmatic figures through the transfiguration of well-known film characters. Can you speak about these visual shifts and your interest in these unexpected yet partly uncontrolled combinations?

Re-using, re-deploying, and re-making are indeed strategies deployed for both The Nameless and Night Charades. In a sense, I am a kind of ‘found object’ artist. But the ‘found object’ is not just the original films I work with, but it is also audiences’ memories and experiences with these materials. For me, what is critical in such processes is also a form of ‘estrangement’—or ‘making strange’— in their usage. In the case of The Nameless, this came through the deployment of Tony Leung’s incredible filmography into a story about a ‘real-life’ triple agent from Singaporean and Malayan history. In the case of Night Charades, this ‘estrangement’ comes from the attempt to recreate scenes from Hong Kong cinema’s past with AI-generated characters who may be Hong Kongers from the future or, perhaps, a parallel universe.

What happens for you when a popular culture item—in this case, commercial Hong Kong cinema—becomes a conceptual artwork?

In this case, commercial Hong Kong cinema is rendered into a kind of object. By this, I mean displacing it from its normal circuits of production, distribution, and reception, so that we can see and feel it in a different way, with a different lens and a different frame.

Time plays a critical role in your work, including in Night Charades. We had long discussions on how societies get stuck in the sanctuary of nostalgia, whereas a critical and active approach to history may be much more effective, especially in tense sociopolitical moments. Can you speak about this aspect in relation to this commission?

In my last visit to Hong Kong, I visited several exhibitions dedicated to different aspects of Hong Kong popular culture. I was struck by how much of Hong Kong cinema and Cantopop were described as having their ‘Golden Ages’ in the 1980s and 1990s. Of course, I can understand why these are labelled as such, but this way of attributing an unsurpassable peak to past achievements nevertheless troubled me. Naturally, I do not think that the commission has the capacity, nor the intention to critique and much less to overcome this idea of the ‘Golden Age’. But I do think this sentiment influenced my decision to set this charade in an imagined future or parallel world.

History and film both offer a productive terrain for speculative time-based experiences. Is this one of the reasons why you express your research on history through time-based media? What interests you in this analogy?

Indeed, sometimes I think time is the true medium with which I work. History, along with film and other forms of moving images, is simply one of the forms in which time is manifested. Every historical account, for example, relies upon certain assumptions of what time is, even if these assumptions are seldom, if ever, spelt out. Each historical account, like each film, manifests a particular shape of time or a form.

Sound is an important aspect of your work. How did you approach the idea of musicality for a soundless screen?

This absence of sound was indeed one of the biggest initial challenges for me, but this challenge was also what made this commission so exciting. In many of my previous video installations, I considered the element of sound to be, at the very least, just as important as the image. In a way, images are like the flesh, animated by the sound, which is like the soul. But in the process of thinking and working through Night Charades, I realized that what attracted me to the world of sound was not a specific sound per se, but rather the shapes formed by a series of sounds in sequence. And these shapes of time, or rhythmic forms, can be generated without the use of sound itself. A silent musicality can be embodied in the slowed-down motion of the AI-generated charade players and, importantly, the effects of this motion upon the sculpted folds of their intensely pleated costumes. In this, I was greatly inspired by the master painters of draperies and folds, such as Caravaggio, Paolo Veronese, and Paul Cézanne.

You are creating a gallery version of Night Charades—what kind of soundtrack are you planning for the work? Will the sound follow the randomised editing of the visuals?

I imagine each scene and each gesture to be accompanied by two sounds at once; a sound from the past, derived from the original materials, and a new sound created in the present. The past persists, the present exists, and the future insists.