Verge Gallery
Date: Thursday 22 April 2021
Time: 6:00–7:15 pm AEDT
Location: Online Event
Wei Leng Tay and artist John Young AM in conversation. Moderated by Olivier Krischer.
‘Abridge’ began with a series of interviews with migrants to Hong Kong from southern China, which led Wei Leng Tay to revisit a body of photographs she made while living and working in Hong Kong from 1999 to 2015. In this conversation, Australian-Hong Kong artist John Young AM joins Wei Leng to discuss how their practices confront history, memory, identity and displacement. John Young’s series ‘1967Dispersion’ (2008), based on the circumstances prompting the artist’s migration from Hong Kong to Australia in 1967, marked the first of Young’s ‘History Projects’ (2007-2019), which have explored the imaging of historical trauma and transcultural solidarity as a form of ethical and social practice. For both artists, Hong Kong has been a site of personal experience yet also a catalyst for exploring such complex issues more globally, and from the present.
BIOS
WEI LENG TAY
Working across mediums including photography, audio, installation and video, Wei Leng Tay’s practice focuses on how representation is used in image-making and how difference can be negotiated through perception/reception, and the materiality of photographs. She uses formal strategies in installation, in the relationships between the visual and audio, image and text, and bodily experiences in encounters to question ingrained modes of perception and representation. One of the ongoing topics in Wei Leng’s practice is displacement as a result of movement and migration, focusing on emotional and psychic uneasiness related to ideas of agency, home and belonging. The works begin with the personal, in the realm of the family, and then build to consider ways the personal interacts with society, the state, the geopolitical.
Tay has had numerous solo exhibitions including the ‘4-part Crossings’ at NUS Museum, Singapore (2018-2019) and ‘The Other Shore’ at Australian National University CIW Gallery, Australia (2016). She has collaborated with institutions such as ARTER Space for Art, Istanbul, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Japan, NTU CCA Singapore and Objectifs Centre for Photography and Film, Singapore. Her works are in museum collections including those of the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Japan, Hong Kong Heritage Museum and National Taiwan Museum of Fine Art. https://www.weilengtay.com
JOHN YOUNG
John Young AM has dedicated a four-decade long practice to the investigation of Western late and post-modernism from a bicultural perspective. He has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally, including representing Australia at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; as well as in large-scale touring exhibitions initiated by Australia in the Asia-Pacific (1998-2000). https://www.johnyoungstudio.com
OLIVIER KRISCHER
Olivier Krischer is an art historian, curator and translator interested in the relationship of art to social change in East Asia. From 2018-21, he was Deputy and Acting Director of The University of Sydney China Studies Centre. He is currently an Honorary Associate in Art History at The University of Sydney, and convenor of the Sydney Asian Art Series.
Krischer’s recent curatorial projects include ‘Wayfaring: Photography in 1970s-80s Taiwan’ (co-curated with Shuxia Chen, 2021), ‘Zhang Peili: from Painting to Video’ (co-curated with Kim Machan, 2016), ‘Wei Leng Tay: The Other Shore’ (2016), and ‘Between: Picturing 1950-60s Taiwan’ (2015). His publications include: Shades of Green: Notes on China’s Eco-civilisation(co-edited with L. Tomba, 2021); Zhang Peili: from Painting to Video(2019); the special issue ‘Asian Art Research in Australia and New Zealand: Past, Present and Future’, Australia & New Zealand Journal of Art (co-edited with S. Whiteman, 2016), Asia through Art and Anthropology: Cultural Translation Across Borders (with F. Nakamura, M. Perkins, 2013).
Image credit, detail of: © Wei Leng Tay. Article 23 protest I, Causeway Bay, 1/7/2003. Contact sheet, Kodak Portra 400VC negative film, 135mm. 2019, digital c-print, 90x120cm.