Through her work over the years, Wei Leng Tay learns, unlearns, understands, and opens herself up to different ideologies, beliefs, histories and realities through the people she meets and situations she navigates.
Working across mediums including photography, audio, installation and video, Wei Leng Tay's practice focuses on how representation is used in image-making and how difference can be negotiated through perception/reception, and the materiality of photographs.
She meets, interviews, photographs and makes video recordings of people and places they inhabit. She also works with archival material - mainly family photographs and documents, by reworking the form and content of slides, photo prints or negatives. These processes induce many questions: What is happening between the self and the subject, the self and the place, the self and the object? How is one looking? How can one tell, or retell a story or memory? How can one listen? Embody an experience?
One of the ongoing topics in her practice is displacement as a result of movement and migration, focusing on emotional and psychic uneasiness related to ideas of agency, home and belonging. The works begin with the personal, and then build to consider ways the personal interacts with society, the state, the geopolitical.
Through her work over the years, Wei Leng Tay learns, unlearns, understands, and opens herself up to different ideologies, beliefs, histories and realities through the people she meets and situations she navigates. While working through understanding and communicating the complexities of familial and societal ties and rifts are important, equally so are how these ideas can be articulated in the aesthetic form and its presentation. This aesthetic process functions as an extension, projection and documentation of the processual encounters.
Wei Leng Tay is a Singaporean artist with a Master of Fine Art, Photography, Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College, USA . Her works are in the collection of the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Japan , Singapore Art Museum, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan, Hong Kong Heritage Museum to name a few.