Ms Wei Leng Tay is a Lecturer of Art Practice at Yale-NUS College where she teaches art practice modules covering photography, media, materiality, and historical immersion in the Singapore art scene.
Ms Tay has presented solo exhibitions including those with University of Sydney Verge Gallery (Abridge), Australia, National University of Singapore (NUS) Museum (Crossings and Discordant Symmetries), Singapore, and Chulalongkorn Art Center (Convergence), Thailand. She has also exhibited with institutions and festivals such as the National Gallery Singapore, Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts, Japan, ARTER Space for Art, Turkey, Selasar Sunaryo Art Space, Indonesia, Para Site Art Space, Hong Kong, the Asian Art Biennial, Taiwan, Daegu Photo Biennale, South Korea, and Noorderlicht Photo Festival, the Netherlands. Her work has been supported through residencies including with Nanyang Technological University Centre for Contemporary Art (NTU CCA), Singapore, Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Japan, Centro de Creación Contemporanea de Andalucía (C3A), Spain, and Australian National University School of Art. She was recently a finalist for the Robert Gardner Fellowship for Photography at the Peabody Museum, Harvard University (2022), a winner of the Wyng Foundation WMA Prize (2016), a Poynter Fellow with Yale School of Art (2015), and a recipient of the National Arts Council (NAC) Singapore Arts Creation Fund (2009). Her works are in institutional and private collections, including those of the Chau Chak Wing Museum, Australia, Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Japan, Hong Kong Heritage Museum, Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, USA, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Art, and Singapore Art Museum. Her projects have been the subject of articles in peer-reviewed journals including Southeast of Now (NUS Press), Trans Asia Photography (TAP) Review (U. of Michigan Press), and art publications ArtAsiaPacific and OSMOS.
Ms Tay holds an MFA (Photography) from Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College, and a BSc (Biology) from McGill University. Her practice is also informed by her experience in journalism spanning over two decades as a photographer and photo editor in the Asia Pacific region. Ms Tay was Deputy Picture Editor at TIME Magazine’s Asia Edition based in Hong Kong, and a Photo Editor with Bloomberg News Asia Pacific in Hong Kong and Singapore.
Ms Wei Leng Tay is an artist who works across disciplines including photography, video, and installation. She uses formal strategies in installation, the relationship between image and text, and social encounters, to consider ingrained modes of perception and representation. She also questions photography’s relationship to contemporary society through its materiality. An ongoing topical focus is displacement as a result of movement and migration, in relation to ideas of agency and belonging.
Two of Ms Tay’s recent multi-partite works “Untitled (Family Slides 60s-70s)” and “Abridge” look at how history and memory are affected by visualisations of the photographic object through its materiality and technology. These projects work with a family archive of slides for the former, and Ms Tay’s own archive of photographs from Hong Kong and interviews with immigrants from Southern China for the latter. “between leaving and arriving,” part of the constellation of works in “Untitled (Family Slides 60s-70s),” is currently exhibited and profiled in the National Gallery Singapore’s historical survey of photography from the region: “Living Pictures: Photography from South East Asia.”
Ms Tay is also part of collective projects working through ideas of communality and authorship through art and exhibition making. She is currently in Progressive Disintegrations (2020 – present) with Hilmi Johandi, Marc Gloede and Chua Chye Teck (Singapore), and the group has collaborated with guest artists including Brian O’Doherty and Tanatchai Bandasak through their exhibitions. Ms Tay was also a part of Sightlines (2016-2019) with Michelle Wong, C&G Artpartment, Lam Wing Sze, Kin Choi Lam and South Ho (Hong Kong).
Descriptions and documentation of her projects can be found on www.weilengtay.com
Research Specialisations- Visual Art
- Photography
- Documentary Practices
- Collective Art Practices
- The Materiality of Photographs: Craft and Perception
- The Document in Image-Making
- Introduction to the Arts
- Portraiture
- Singapore Arts In and Through 1997
- Art Studio Research, Experimentation and Critique
