Wei Leng Tay (b. 1978, Singapore) is a photographer and artist based in Hong Kong and Singapore whose practice spans various multi-media including photography, audio, installation, and video. She focuses on how representation is used in image-making and how differences can be negotiated through perception/reception, and the materiality of photographs. A recurrent theme in her works is the notion of displacement, where she highlights the emotional and psychic uneasiness of migration in relation to agency, home and belonging. Through her work over the years, Wei Leng Tay learns, unlearns, understands, and opens herself up to different ideologies, beliefs, histories and realities through the people she meets and situations she navigates. While working through understanding and communicating the complexities of familial and societal ties and rifts are important, equally so are how these ideas could be articulated in the aesthetic form and its presentation. This aesthetic process functions as an extension, projection and documentation of the processual encounters.
Tay has collaborated with art organisations and institutions in countries such as Japan, Thailand, Singapore and Taiwan to produce works intimately linked to ideas of identity, displacement and the self. Her work has also been featured in numerous exhibitions in venues such as ARTER Space for Art, Istanbul, the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Japan, NUS Museum, Singapore, Stacion – Center for Contemporary Art Prishtina, Kosovo, and the Selasar Sunaryo Art Space in Bandung, Indonesia. Her photographic works are in public and private collections across Asia (Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Japan , Singapore Art Museum, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan, Hong Kong Heritage Museum.)
Tay also works in journalism. She has freelanced as a photographer for publications such as TIME, Fortune, and the New York Times Magazine. She has also worked as a photo editor in Hong Kong for Asiaweek Magazine (2000-2001), TIME Magazine’s Asia Edition (2003-2008) and Bloomberg News (2011-2014), assigning and working with photographers across Asia on award winning coverage ranging from politics, natural disasters to business and economics.