Coinciding with the Singapore International Photography Festival 2026, VITRINE by Yeo Workshop presents What Remains: A Dialogue across time, an exhibition placing the photographic works of Singaporean artists Wei Leng Tay and Loke Hong Seng in a cross-generational dialogue. Bringing Loke’s black-and-white records of a city undergoing rapid transformation into conversation with Tay’s materially experimental approach to photography, the exhibition asks how images shape memory—and how they continue to influence the histories we inherit.
One of the pioneers of Singapore street photography, Loke Hong Seng documented the country’s nation-building decades of the 1960s and 1970s. His images trace industrialisation and urban change through scenes of kampungs, bumboat coolies, trishaws and samsui women, alongside construction sites, emerging HDB estates and the contours of a modernising skyline. More than nostalgic records, they are social portraits of a nation being remade.
Tay approaches photography from a later moment, when the medium’s status as evidence can no longer be taken for granted. Working across photography, audio, video and installation, she examines how images are made, handled, remembered and reinterpreted. Through archival material, cyanotype and contact-printing processes, digital imaging and physical manipulation, Tay brings private memory into contact with wider social histories.
The exhibition is organised through visual and conceptual correspondences rather than chronology.
Tay’s Absence of… depicts her former apartment building, a home that no longer exists. Seen alongside Loke’s images of construction and newly built HDB housing, the work creates a poignant exchange between disappearance and arrival: the personal space lost to time and the new homes through which a nation imagined its future.
Concerned with photography’s materiality and medium, Tay’s new series Cuts | Traces | Arrangements (2026) explores translation through the manipulation of archival photographs. The series takes as its point of departure photographs documenting an ikebana competition held in Penang, Malaysia, in 1963, in which Tay’s mother participated. Emerging from a post-war and postcolonial context, these arrangements embody a localised translation of the Japanese practice at a moment of cultural and political transition in Malaysia.
In reimagining this archive, Tay considers how aesthetic systems such as ikebana mediate relationships between nature, discipline and representation, particularly within histories shaped by migration, colonial exchange and transcultural networks. Through layered processes of sanding, repetition and digital intervention, she treats the photographic surface as an active site of transformation rather than passive documentation. Compositional formations drawn from ikebana are also translated into spatial elements, creating a tactile dialogue between image, object and site.
Elsewhere, portraits meet across generations: Tay’s Untitled (Tay in Five Parts) is placed in relation to Loke’s Portrait, Teh Tarik Stall Owner, bringing together two different modes of describing a life through an image. Tay’s use of cyanotype and Loke’s portraiture also recall historical forms of the photographic medium, while highlighting how each artist tests its ability to carry meaning across time.
The installation responds closely to Downtown Gallery’s architecture and its relationship to the city outside. Loke’s bold, recognisable street scenes occupy the street-facing panels, where motifs such as trishaws and samsui women remain legible through the glass. Tay’s works draw viewers inward, rewarding proximity and slower looking. Her orange Ink Residue work interrupts the photographic sequence with a vivid material note, while works from Cuts | Traces | Arrangements extend its rhythm through linear and diagonal configurations.
Together, the works resist a simple opposition between past and present. Loke’s photographs document a Singapore at a decisive stage of change; Tay’s practice examines the very idea of the photograph as documentation. The exhibition therefore shifts the question from what an image shows to how an image acts: what it preserves, what it abstracts, and what becomes visible only from the vantage point of another time.
