Crossings: A Solo Exhibition By Wei Leng Tay

The final iteration of Crossings by Wei Leng Tay returns audiences’ focus to ‘you think it over slowly, slowly choose…’. First appearing at the launch of this four-part show as 650 re-photographs on tissue prints of 13 existing family photographs, this work considers the entangled circumstances that affect familial and state-driven relationships, as well as hierarchies, through the dispossession of the artist’s grandaunt who crossed into Singapore in 1955. She remained stateless till her death in Singapore in 2004. The tissue prints have remained through the exhibition’s iterative sequences in the trough of sherds that cuts through the Archaeology Library, softly diminishing over time. For this last iteration, the spectral nature of the subject is further manifested as video and texts emerge in place of the tissue prints. These new works overlay internalised values with social constructs imposed through relationships implicit in the self, family and the state.