{"id":1375,"date":"2018-06-25T21:53:28","date_gmt":"2018-06-25T13:53:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.brack.sg\/?p=1375"},"modified":"2020-01-13T21:06:56","modified_gmt":"2020-01-13T13:06:56","slug":"brackchat-hello-session-with-wei-leng-tay-on-statelessness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.brack.sg\/index.php\/2018\/06\/25\/brackchat-hello-session-with-wei-leng-tay-on-statelessness\/","title":{"rendered":"#BrackChat (Part 2): Hello Session with Wei Leng Tay \u2015 On Statelessness"},"content":{"rendered":"
RESEARCHER KIRIN HENG<\/a> <\/span>VISITED ARTIST\u00a0WEI LENG TAY<\/a><\/span> AT HER NINE-MONTH SOLO EXHIBITION CROSSINGS<\/a><\/span> AT NUS MUSEUM, ABOUT THE THEME OF MIGRATION AND DISPLACEMENT.<\/h5>\n
WEI LENG TAY IS A FORMER PHOTOJOURNALIST WORKING WITH PHOTOGRAPHY, AUDIO AND VIDEO THAT ARE MADE INTO INSTALLATIONS AND PRINTS. SHE TAKES AN ORGANIC, CONVERSATIONAL APPROACH IN HER WORK, THE IMAGES AND FORM OF HER WORK INSPIRED BY INTERACTIONS SHE HAS WITH PEOPLE SHE MEETS. THIS IS THE SECOND OF THREE INTERVIEW EXTRACTS. READ PARTS 1<\/a><\/span> AND 3<\/span><\/a>.<\/strong><\/h5>\n

The following is an excerpt from the interview about the element in her exhibition that uses the medium of Kleenex to print photographs as a comment on statelessness, transcribed by Athirah Annissa<\/span>. It has been edited lightly for clarity. It has been edited lightly for clarity on 26 August 2019.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

All photos are from Wei Leng Tay\u2019s <\/span><\/em>website<\/em><\/a><\/span>.<\/p>\n

Moving back to Singapore, I wanted to think of the idea of mobility, the idea of displacement\u2026 Mobility is also kind of a norm; it\u2019s rare to have someone who just doesn\u2019t go anywhere.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

W:\u00a0<\/strong>That work particularly, the tissue paper work, is comprised of family photos of my grand-aunt, printed on Kleenex. There are thirteen existing photos, family photos of her (she\u2019s dead now).<\/p>\n

I started working on this work and all the other works in the exhibition since 2014 till now. I left Hong Kong in the end of 2015, but I decided to be here [in Singapore] in late 2016, so I in the last few years, I was moving around a little bit while also spending quite a bit of time in Pakistan\u2014that\u2019s why a lot of the works are also based on Pakistan.<\/p>\n

Moving back to Singapore, I wanted to think of the idea of mobility, the idea of displacement\u2026 Mobility is also kind of a norm; it\u2019s rare to have someone who just doesn\u2019t go anywhere.<\/p>\n

I started thinking about that in terms of coming back here, and thinking what it means to come back to a place. Then I started thinking about how several years ago, I had met this person who had been stateless in Singapore for several decades, who had come before independence, but because she was not of the right class or [whatever it is], the government didn\u2019t want to give citizenship to her.<\/p>\n

I thought about that in terms of mobility or imposed immobility, in relation to mobility and migration and what we do today. My migrant grandaunt [pictured on the Kleenex pieces] also came to Singapore, in 1955, and she was denied citizenship her entire life. Using that as a starting point, I wanted to think about what that means and the kind of system that we live in, and the kind of value that we place on people.<\/p>\n

For that work, I was interviewing her son, my uncle, who was also stateless till the late seventies, for about twenty-three years. My aunt was here for fifty years, and she was stateless for the fifty years that she was here. When you\u2019re stateless, you can\u2019t really leave. You\u2019re just stuck, because you don\u2019t have papers or anything.<\/p>\n

So I interviewed him, and my family in Malaysia. I then began trying to piece [everything] together, because everybody was kind of old… [it meant having to] piece together these things. My aunts and uncles don\u2019t remember, or they have a different version of the same thing, so it entailed]putting together what this was. And so [my work grappled with how] we think about memory as well.<\/p>\n

Using that tissue, I basically took each photo, re-photographed it with my iPhone fifty times and reconstituted each photo. I then printed them out on tissue paper, which is pretty much disposable and degrades the photo. It\u2019s translucent, very tactile, very emotional as a material.<\/p>\n

In the original work there are 650 smaller prints, but right now it\u2019s just become bits and clumps. We\u2019ve taken out the rest from the previous show.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

RESEARCHER KIRIN HENG VISITED ARTIST\u00a0WEI LENG TAY AT HER NINE-MONTH SOLO EXHIBITION CROSSINGS AT NUS MUSEUM, ABOUT THE THEME OF MIGRATION AND DISPLACEMENT. WEI LENG TAY IS A FORMER PHOTOJOURNALIST WORKING WITH PHOTOGRAPHY, AUDIO AND VIDEO THAT ARE MADE INTO INSTALLATIONS AND PRINTS. SHE TAKES AN ORGANIC, CONVERSATIONAL APPROACH IN HER WORK, THE IMAGES AND […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":1376,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[266],"class_list":["post-1375","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-conversations","tag-tayweileng"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brack.sg\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1375","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brack.sg\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brack.sg\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brack.sg\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/38"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brack.sg\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1375"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.brack.sg\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1375\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1952,"href":"https:\/\/www.brack.sg\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1375\/revisions\/1952"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brack.sg\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1376"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brack.sg\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1375"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brack.sg\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1375"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brack.sg\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1375"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}