Yeo Workshop is excited to return to Liste Basel 2026 for a second year, presenting new and recent works by Singapore artists Wei Leng Tay and Brandon Tay, whose practices, while distinct in medium and methodology, intersect around questions of perception and technological systems.
Concerned with the materiality and medium of photography, Wei Leng Tay has developed Cuts | Traces | Arrangements (2026), a new series that explores translation through the manipulation of archival photographs. This series takes its point of departure from a set of archival photographs documenting ikebana flower arrangements from a 1963 competition in Penang, Malaysia, that Wei Leng’s mother had participated in. Emerging in a post-war and postcolonial context, these arrangements reflect a localised translation of the Japanese practice, situated within a moment of cultural and political transition in Malaysia. Wei Leng’s re-imagining of these photographs explore how aesthetic systems such as ikebana mediate relationships between nature, discipline and representation, particularly within histories shaped by migration and colonial exchange, and the transcultural networks they find themselves in. Through the manual and layered processes of sanding, repetition, and digital interventions, Wei Leng emphasises the photographic surface as an active site of transformation, rather than passive documentation. She also translates compositional formations from ikebana into spatial elements within the installation, creating a tactile dialogue between image, object and site.
Brandon Tay’s sculptures construct a speculative historiography where scientific breakthroughs, technological infrastructure and human consciousness collide under the influence of unseen forces. Serpent Vessel (2025) draws on German scientist Friedrich August Kekulé's famous dream of an ouroboros—an ancient symbol that depicts a serpent eating its own tail—that led to his discovery of benzene's ring structure, while Votive Spiral (2025) references James Watson and Francis Crick's discovery of DNA's double helix structure. Brandon turns these subconscious revelations into speculative narratives with theocratic undertones, reflecting on how intuitive leaps and subconscious revelations can radically alter the course of history, challenging conventional understanding of how progress and belief intersect. Similarly, DOOMSCROLL DREAMACHINE (2025) explores how media and social platforms function as entertainment technologies—tools engineered to trigger altered states and manipulate human consciousness. It reframes Brion Gysin’s flicker device through the compulsions of infinite scroll, turning doomscrolling into an inadvertent altered-state technology. Through a combination of LED displays and a speculative timeline on UV-printed canvas designed by Darius Ou, the work suggests how today’s social platforms quietly extend the same lineage—masked as entertainment, optimised as infrastructure, and refined by entities operating just beyond public view.
By placing Wei Leng Tay’s photographic work in dialogue with Brandon Tay’s sculptures, this duo-presentation invites audiences to look beyond the surface of the images and platforms we consume, revealing how deeply our ways of seeing, believing, and remembering are actively engineered.
