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.
WEI LENG TAY (b. 1978, Singapore) works across photography, video, and installation and explores constructions of identity, memory, and history through her practice. Her works draw on long-term engagements with individuals, families, and communities, and include research into photographic archives, interviews, and collaborative processes. Central to her practice is a sustained inquiry into the medium of photography through its materiality, modes of circulation, and communicative possibilities. By working at the intersection of the intimate and the structural, Tay unpacks the complexities of belonging, displacement, and the politics of representation, bringing attention to what it means to be human within today’s shifting political and cultural contexts.
Tay’s work has been exhibited internationally, including at National Gallery Singapore; NUS Museum; ARTER Space for Art, Turkey; Fotostiftung Schweiz, Winterthur, Switzerland; Daegu Photo Biennale, South Korea; Jut Art Museum, Taiwan; Asian Art Biennial, Taiwan; Para Site, Hong Kong and is in collections including the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Singapore Art Museum, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Chau Chak Wing Museum, Australia, and Morgan Stanley Art Collection. Tay received the Alexander Tutsek Photography Grant, Munich (2025), Wyng Foundation WMA Prize, Hong Kong (2017), and was a Yale University Poynter Fellow, New Haven (2015).
This year, Tay will participate in the Singapore International Photography Festival, with her works on view at Yeo Workshop in Gillman Barracks from 17 October. She will also participate in The Present is Unstable, a group exhibition at the Singapore Art Museum from 2 October 2026 to 18 July 2027. She is featured in an upcoming publication, Great Women Photographers, by Phaidon launching in October 2026.