In Timepieces – Perfect Lovers (Torres), Ho Tzu Nyen revisits and refracts Félix González-Torres’s iconic 1991 artwork Untitled (Perfect Lovers)—a minimalist pairing of two identical battery-operated clocks ticking in sync until they drift apart. Where González-Torres’s clocks metaphorically captured the intimacy and eventual loss of his partner to AIDS, Ho’s digital reinterpretation introduces a technological precision that resists such divergence. In doing so, he opens a philosophical inquiry into how we understand time, presence, and loss across shifting cultural and temporal contexts. Ho’s practice often engages the political and mythical dimensions of Southeast Asia’s histories, using film, performance, and installation to navigate identity, power, and memory. Here, however, he mobilizes the language of tribute and homage not to recreate but to critically complicate. The digital clocks, incapable of falling out of sync, silently expose a rupture: technological progress has eliminated the poetic imperfection that gave González-Torres’s work its haunting vulnerability.

We could consider Henri Bergson’s distinction between ‘chronological time’ and ‘duration’when confronting this work - duration being the subjective flow of lived experience. Ho reflects on how digital accuracy obscures our felt experience of time. In a world dominated by atomic clocks and synchronized systems, the intimate subjectivity of time—how we live it—is increasingly overwritten. The sensual drift, the quiet metaphor for impermanence in González-Torres’s work, becomes unreachable in Ho’s iteration, replaced by relentless precision. Within this sterile accuracy, a new space opens. The work invites reflection on how time is remembered, technologized, and memorialized. It holds a mirror to the present—where personal loss is digitized, historic trauma becomes data, and memory itself is caught between duration and measurement. The work does not merely replicate or erase the past—it introduces distance. Ho’s clocks acknowledge the temporal and technological gulf separating us from the historical moment in which González-Torres’s piece was created, a time marked by urgency, grief, and the devastating losses of the AIDS crisis. Ho suggests a different kind of temporality—one extended, perhaps desensitized by technological continuity. It invites us to reflect on how time, loss, and memory are experienced differently today, and how advances in technology may unintentionally obscure emotional truths. Through this re-presentation, Ho opens space to consider not only the transformation of time itself but also the changing ways we memorialize love, death, and historical trauma in an increasingly digitized world. Timepieces – Perfect Lovers (Torres) does not try to replicate the original’s emotional charge. Instead, it offers a dissonant elegy to time’s transformation, revealing how perfect synchronization conceals profound emotional distance and subjective experience.