RESEARCHER KIRIN HENG VISITED ARTIST WEI 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 FORM OF HER WORK INSPIRED BY INTERACTIONS SHE HAS WITH PEOPLE SHE MEETS. THIS IS THE SECOND OF THREE INTERVIEW EXTRACTS. READ PARTS 1 AND 3.

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. It has been edited lightly for clarity. It has been edited lightly for clarity on 26 August 2019. 

All photos are from Wei Leng Tay’s website.

Moving back to Singapore, I wanted to think of the idea of mobility, the idea of displacement… Mobility is also kind of a norm; it’s rare to have someone who just doesn’t go anywhere.

W: 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’s dead now).

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—that’s why a lot of the works are also based on Pakistan.

Moving back to Singapore, I wanted to think of the idea of mobility, the idea of displacement… Mobility is also kind of a norm; it’s rare to have someone who just doesn’t go anywhere.

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’t want to give citizenship to her.

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.

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’re stateless, you can’t really leave. You’re just stuck, because you don’t have papers or anything.

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’t 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.

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’s translucent, very tactile, very emotional as a material.

In the original work there are 650 smaller prints, but right now it’s just become bits and clumps. We’ve taken out the rest from the previous show.