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Tay’s recent images are premised on re-articulating, or revisiting, older bodies of work. She has physically re-photographed pictures from her Convergence series (2009), which reflects on the Chinese diaspora in...
Tay’s recent images are premised on re-articulating, or revisiting, older bodies of work. She has physically re-photographed pictures from her Convergence series (2009), which reflects on the Chinese diaspora in Singapore and Malaysia, as well as corresponding issues of historical memory and ethno-politics. Imbricated in the transference of the image from one form to another – from the analogue, as slides, to the digital – is also the gesture of abstraction, or rendering the image visually illegible. For the Revisited images, the artist shot several of the original photographs to produce one image, capturing only a particular section that often included temporally and spatially specific elements, such as sunlight coming in through the window at that moment. In this case, a number of the images from Convergence were of an old Chinese woman’s home in Ipoh, Malaysia, and the supposedly unmediated access to memory and history that the camera proffers is complicated by Tay’s defamiliarizing of the pictorial tableaux. Here, in the manner of Hito Steyerl’s poor image, the impairment of visual comprehension suggests various forms of estrangement – personal, familial, socio-historical.