Ho Rui An is an artist and writer working in the intersections of contemporary art, cinema, performance and theory. Across the mediums of lecture, essay and film, he probes into the ways by which images are produced, circulate and disappear within systems of governance in a global age.
Ultimate Coin Test China High-Speed Rail, 2018
HD video, loop
Courtesy of the artist
DASH, 2016–18
Lecture and video installation with car seats and synchronised screens
Courtesy: the artist
In Ho Rui An’s lecture-performance DASH (2017), the frictions between the intersecting realms of the technological and the traditional are represented as a full-frontal collision between a venture capitalist’s sports car and a humble taxi – a moment the artist opts to narrate instead of showing. Captured on a dash-cam and uploaded to YouTube, footage of the accident becomes a cipher for the imbrication of frontier narratives and financial eschatology: while the artist talks, the viewer is shown a sequence of dash-cam car crashes uncannily similar to Hollywood car-chase scenes. While the dashboard emerges as a signifier for the god’s-eye view (he who, surviving the crash, drives on towards the horizon’s vanishing point), Singapore itself appears as a liminal space, standing at the intersection between a traditional way of life and a cyber-modulated social milieu, while the metaphors of speed and acceleration are codified as a form of upward motion, leading to the future.
Twenty-Four Cinematic Points of View of a Factory Gate in China, 2023
Video 4K
New commission
Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory (1895), by Louis Lumière is often referred to as the first motion picture ever made. The film shows a vast mass of, mostly female, workers pouring out of the gates of the Lumière Factory. The Lumière siblings chose to film this scene, artist Ho Rui An, argues, because workers being freed from the disciplinary confines of the factory was the perfect way to capture motion, in the physical sense, as well as transformation workers undergo when, shedding their class identity, they leave the factory behind and resume their personal lives. This is because, as Marx put it, the worker ‘feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home’. Whereas factory gates kept these two worlds separate, the artist finds that current security cameras offer a different perspective, one that allows one a peak into the world inside the gates. Examining security footage of a factory in China, the artist finds there is ‘not a lot to be seen’.There are not enough workers leaving the factory.