Hyundai opens Ho Tzu Nyen exhibition in New York and Ulsan under new Translocal Series

Hyundai Motor Company announced the opening of Hyundai Translocal Series: Ho Tzu Nyen, co-organized by the New Museum in New York, United States, and the Ulsan Art Museum in Ulsan, Korea. The exhibition is the first in a three-year collaboration between the two institutions under Hyundai Motor's Hyundai Translocal Series initiative. Beginning with this show, the New Museum and the Ulsan Art Museum will collaborate on a three-year exhibition program through 2028, with two additional commissions to follow. The works are presented in parallel across the two cities, connecting New York and Ulsan through a shared conceptual framework while responding to the distinct architectural and cultural contexts of each site.

The exhibition presents newly commissioned, site-specific works by Singapore-based artist Ho Tzu Nyen, whose work across film, video, performance and multimedia installation investigates the plurality of cultural identities across Southeast Asia. Drawing on numerous Eastern and Western cultural references, his works blend mythical narratives and historical facts to mobilize different understandings of history, its writing and its transmission. Commissioned for the New Museum, P for Power: Up Down (2026) is installed on screens in the museum's OMA-designed, glass-front elevators looking onto the Bowery. When an elevator button is activated, a life-size child protagonist appears on screen and delivers a short text in the form of a mantra, question, riddle or note reflecting on the nature of power. Each time a visitor presses a floor button, an AI system generates a new image sequence in real time, so that AI functions not simply as a tool for producing images but as a generative structure through which narratives and identities remain open to change.