What the Asian tiger teaches us about ourselves.
Reprinted from DW Made for Minds;
German Politics/Culture Magazine
In Asian symbolism, tigers can shape-shift as friends or enemies or even gods. A Berlin exhibition reveals how a closer look at the Asian tiger uncovers untold aspects of history - and our own identities. The tiger is enigmatically woven into
Asian folklore, as an ancestor, companion, competitor, protector, destroyer, or even a god.
The Chinese associate it with kings. In India, Shiva, thegod of destruction and transformation, is almost always depicted as wearing a tiger skin and riding on a tiger. It is also a common fixture in the cultures of other Asian countries, including
Malaysia, Myanmar, Thailand, Indonesia, Japan and Cambodia, where it serves as a symbol of national power, military prowess and economic development.
Tigers also represent the spaces between the known and the unknown. Shamans used to invoke tigers to move between worlds and communicate with the dead. As a creature of mountains and borderlands, the tiger occupies a transitory zone separating civilization
from wilderness, the living from the ancestor-spirit world, and possesses the ability to shape-shift.
The tiger is a master of metamorphosis. In such a way, the tiger also serves as a mediator between the familiar and the exotic. It is this process of mediation, and the experience of otherness that an exhibition in Berlin aims to dissect. "2 or 3
Tigers," on view at the Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt through July 3, 2017, is an exploration of the historical insights rendered in the iconic symbol of the Asian tiger.
HO Tzu Nyen's "One or Several Tigers" was inspired by a 19th-century lithograph Silenced histories According to co-curators Hyunjin Kim and Anselm Franke, the exhibition is "about the re-signification of meaning and the different ways in which history
is mediated." That is to say, it explores how one thing comes to mean different things, at different times, to different people.
The exhibition derives its title from its center-piece, a 3D animation by Singaporean artist and film maker HO Tzu Nyen. "One or Several Tigers" (2017) is a mesmerizing installation that portrays various encounters between humans and tigers,
from the perspective of a shape-shifting tiger.
The work is inspired by a Heinrich Leutemann lithograph, titled "Road Surveying Interrupted in Singapore). This lithograph depicts an actual incident in which a colonial surveyor, G.D. Coleman, and a group of Indian convict laborers were attacked
by a tiger while constructing a new road through the jungle in 1835.
