CROSSINGS by Tay Wei Leng

Taking the exhibition Crossings as both anchor and point of departure, this publication echoes and finds new ways to see the aspirations, anxieties and inquiries that coalesced around the project. Crossings is a one-year solo exhibition collaboration between Wei Leng Tay, NUS Museum, and Curator Sidd Perez that ran at the NUS Museum from March 2018-May 2019. It featured a four-part exhibition of Wei Leng Tay’s research from 2014-2018 that spans stories of lived and inherited migration of individuals from different generations and backgrounds in Pakistan, Hong Kong and Singapore. Through a process that begins with interviews and continues with a formal interrogation of the image and voice as document, ideas of agency, relationships and nation implicit to moving between places of home are elaborated.

More a literary reader than an exhibition guide, the text weaves between letters and essays, poetry and prose. It features interlocutors from the MOVE Workshop that was organised around the exhibition, as well as various other artists, curators and academics. The text is a conscious untangling and reconsideration of the discourses of migration through notions of movement, documentation, representation, temporality, and fragmentation.

About Wei Leng Tay

Wei Leng Tay is an artist working with photography, audio and video that are made into installations and prints. Her process begins with conversations and interactions with people she meets, which inform the images and forms the projects take.

As she works with various parties on her projects, she reflects on the significance of this interaction for both herself and the other party, and how this relationship, however transient and brief, can be articulated in the work. Her works are usually based on how desires, personal relationships and histories are tied to family, society, and the state, and migration. They also reflect on the politics of perception and relation: Who is looking and how is one looking? What is being heard? Why does one, as viewer, maker, participant, feel certain ways about the work? In this way, the works also consider the impossibility of representation and knowing, adding another dimension to the complexities of identity and sense of place or displacement dealt with.