WEI LENG TAY
’ABRIDGE’
CURATED BY OLIVIER KRISCHER
17 APRIL – 22 MAY, 2021
© Wei Leng Tay. A boy at Repulse Bay Beach during SARS, Repulse Bay, 2003. Kodak E100VS slide film, 135mm. 2019, digital c-print, 75x100cm. Courtesy of the artist and Verge Gallery.
CURATORIAL STATEMENT
Abridge explores how one can think about images of a past in an uncertain present. This project began as a series of encounters with people who migrated from Southern China to Hong Kong in the 1960s-2000s, building on the artist’s earlier project The Other Shore. But as Tay faced the dilemma of what and how to photograph, depict or record in the present, she began to revisit the corpus of images she had made while living in Hong Kong as a professional photographer for over sixteen years from 1999. In that time, the post-colony witnessed significant changes, many of which passed before her lens. However, her camera also recorded corners of everyday life, forgotten and liminal moments, which have similarly been not so much lost as eclipsed. By re-photographing and transforming parts of these images, as artefacts of a past that is present, she creates a process that parallels her initial conversations about displacements across time and space, and tangentially expresses her complex position in this indeterminate landscape. Through photography, video and audio interviews, Abridge reflects on longing, anxiety and shifting identities that navigate an entangled geography.
© Wei Leng Tay. Barney Cheng fashion show, 2001. Fujifilm RMS slide film, 135mm. 2020, digital c-print, 60x80cm. Courtesy of the artist and Verge Gallery.
Wei Leng Tay, “Abridge”, installation view, 2021. Photography by Zan Wimberley.
The exhibition comprises three parts that reflect aspects and moments of research as the situation in Hong Kong, and the questions underpinning Tay’s process, evolved. The central collection of photographs is a new series of C-type photographic prints made by rephotographing her slides and contact sheets of photographs made in Hong Kong, with her mobile phone. Using her phone registers both shifts in technology and her practice, but also the broader question of the way we see and interact with images, questions highlighted by the role of the camera phone in how we now engage with or experience historic events. Tay uses this now everyday object to physically rediscover her ‘professional’ images of the past. There is a slippage here between their presence as material artefacts, physical remnants of something not so much lost but eclipsed; we simultaneously read them through our familiarity with the present, seeing echoes of protests and pandemics despite the image’s own histories. No longer informing as they once did, if at all, they reflect a past as only so many fragmentary glimpses, rather than a nostalgic whole.
Such an exploration of the role of photography and video in mediating not only the past but also the unfolding history of the present similarly takes on a material form in the work Live streaming, Prince Edward, 12/11/2019, 23:35:05-6. 25 frames per second, 1920×1080 (2019). This work comprises 25 individual prints, each representing a single frame from one second of the live-streamed protests Tay was sitting, like many at the time, watching on television as events unfolded simultaneously in the streets in 2019. Here, there is a tension between the suspended time of the photographic instant, and the montage closure between the collected frames. What was taking place in this long second of ‘history’ – is it any clearer in the freeze frames? Above the television, there sits a barely discernible landscape from one of Tay’s earliest bodies of work, like a spectre or angel of history, looking on.
Wei Leng Tay, “Abridge”, installation view, 2021. Photography by Zan Wimberley.
© Wei Leng Tay. Causeway Bay, 2001. Contact sheet, Kodak Tri-X 400 negative film, 120mm., digital c-print, 75x100cm. Courtesy the artist and Verge Gallery, 2020.
Wei Leng Tay, “Abridge”, installation view, 2021. Photography by Zan Wimberley.
These two bodies of photographic work orbit around Tay’s single-channel video, made from video documentation during her earliest research trips in 2018. Inspiring the exhibition title, and the sense of the fragment and the unsaid, here we join a seemingly endless journey across the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau bridge. An engineering marvel, its business case claims to facilitate regional travel and commerce, yet it symbolically unifies the Mainland to these retrieved former colonies. As the road continues, it is unclear if we are moving forwards or backwards, and to what destination? This video registers layers of tension, change, displacement and illusion in the Abridge project: one of the world’s most ambitious feats of engineering, floating oddly desolate as it bridges a liminal zone of imminence, across past and present, here and there.
Wei Leng Tay, “Abridge”, installation view, 2021. Photography by Zan Wimberley.
Bus ride, Hong Kong to Zhuhai, 28/1/2019, Single channel 16:9 video, colour, stereo sound. 36 min 38 sec. Looped, Wood and diffusion filter screen, 2021.
Roomsheet
Curatorial essay
Wei Leng Tay, “Abridge”, installation view, 2021. Photography by Zan Wimberley.
BIOGRAPHY
WEI LENG TAY
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 uses formal strategies in installation, in the relationships between the visual and audio, image and text, and bodily experiences in encounters to question ingrained modes of perception and representation. One of the ongoing topics in Wei Leng’s 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, in the realm of the family, and then build to consider ways the personal interacts with society, the state, the geopolitical.
Tay has had numerous solo exhibitions including the 4-part Crossings at NUS Museum, Singapore (2018-2019) and The Other Shore at Australian National University CIW Gallery, Australia (2016). She has collaborated with institutions such as ARTER Space for Art, Istanbul, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Japan, NTU CCA Singapore and Objectifs Centre for Photography and Film, Singapore. Her works are in museum collections including those of the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Japan, Hong Kong Heritage Museum and National Taiwan Museum of Fine Art.
For further information
weilengtay.com
OLIVIER KRISCHER
Olivier Krischer is an art historian, curator and translator interested in the relationship of art to social change in East Asia. From 2018-21, he was Deputy and Acting Director of The University of Sydney China Studies Centre. He is currently an Honorary Associate in Art History at The University of Sydney, and convenor of the Sydney Asian Art Series.
Krischer’s recent curatorial projects include Wayfaring: Photography in 1970s-80s Taiwan (co-curated with Shuxia Chen, 2021), Zhang Peili: from Painting to Video (co-curated with Kim Machan, 2016), Weileng Tay: The Other Shore (2016), and Between: Picturing 1950-60s Taiwan (2015). His publications include: Shades of Green: Notes on China’s Eco-civilisation (co-edited with L. Tomba, 2021); Zhang Peili: from Painting to Video (2019); the special issue ‘Asian Art Research in Australia and New Zealand: Past, Present and Future’, Australia & New Zealand Journal of Art (co-edited with S. Whiteman, 2016), Asia through Art and Anthropology: Cultural Translation Across Borders (with F. Nakamura, M. Perkins, 2013).
IN CONVERSATION
“IMAGE HISTORY MEMORY PLACE”
JOHN YOUNG & WEI LENG TAY
FURTHER READING
PODCAST
In conversation with Wei Leng Tay, curator Olivier Krishner and artist Yvette Hamilton