Essays about...: Photographing Your Own (John Rohrbach)

Photographing Your Own

by John Rohrbach

Published in the catalogue 'Discordant Symmetries' by the NUS Museum

Photography’s heart, if not its soul, lies with portraiture, the camera’s ability to describe the sitter’s outward appearance so acutely that one cannot help but enter that person’s world, if just for an instant, to stand before them in a shared humanity. If the portrait is particularly good, it transcends the emotions of the moment, the sitter’s cold distrust or warm embrace of the camera lens, to reflect a larger condition. When the setting shifts beyond the studio, the surrounding details frame the scene in a web of class, lifestyle, and idiosyncrasy.

Wei Leng Tay’s quietly compelling photographic portraits of Chinese in Singapore and Malaysia place before us individuals who have generously accepted the camera’s intrusion into their private lives. Many of the photographs are set in kitchens, bedrooms, and dining rooms. Even those depicting shops and temples offer quiet back areas where people let down their guard. One feels a special privilege at this access. Older sitters offer themselves to the camera often surrounded by tables, shelves, and countertops that are filled with their accumulations of living all close at hand. The settings of younger people tend to present less clutter, suggesting not merely their more modern outlook, but spaces to grow into.

Rarely do the sitters look at her camera. Their disregard raises awareness of the camera’s distance; Wei Leng Tay has positioned herself as if she were a quiet watcher just off-stage. The low light in the images furthers that sense of a theatrical setting. As with plays, the colorful light is carefully focused on the players. Rather than act out for the camera, they exude stillness, or when sitting in groups, quiet interchange. One is reminded of Rineke Dijkstra’s portraits of young women and men. Here too the sitters offer themselves with open passivity to the camera, accepting its presence rather than projecting a stance. Jeff Wall’s Hollywood-infused photographic stagings and Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s subtly crafted family and street fictions come to mind. But where Wall’s and diCorcia’s “slice-of-life” photographs reveal their falsities on extended interrogation, Wei Leng Tay’s images suggest a more honest connection, as if the photographer has settled in about twenty minutes earlier and let initial conversation give way to silence so that the sitters could turn back to their own concerns. Her crafted focus and balanced composition draw one comfortably into this relaxed atmosphere, allowing one to peruse each person and their surroundings at leisure.

What is this performance that Wei Leng Tay introduces? Looked at temporally, it is the settling into life — the initial preoccupation with monetary and career ambitions, courting and raising of a family, and the settling in to a modicum of comfort. Gradually ambitions are diminished, accumulations gather around, and one’s days and nights come to be enveloped by quiet habits. But there is another just as potent angle to her story. It is the flow, played out across the world for centuries, of people who have left their homeland in search of better lives, of the life of one culture embedded within another. This spread of people from one country to another is a tale that many other photographers have depicted over time, from Jacob Riis’ intrusive documentation of migrants to America stuffed into ramshackle tenement houses in lower Manhattan in the 1890s to Brazilian photographer Sebastio Salgado’s late twentieth century heroicizings of third world migrants working in their adopted lands. The life of one culture embedded within another has also been a continuing preoccupation. Arnold Genthe photographed San Francisco’s Chinatown in the 1890s and 1900s. Roman Vishniac photographed the Jewish ghettos of Eastern Europe in the 1930s. Josef Koudelka photographed the gypsy communities dotting his native Czechoslovakia in the early 1960s, just to name three such projects.

Wei Leng Tay now brings us the migration of the Chinese into Singapore and Malaysia. It is a potent subject. Chinese citizens have been migrating not only through Asia, but increasingly to countries across the world. The issue extends far beyond the Chinese, of course. Global migration is a central feature of our time, influencing the world as much as cell phones and the internet. As the New York Times recently pointed out, one can look at almost any headline in the news, and between the lines one will find a chapter in the story of global migration. The United Nations estimates that there are 214 million migrants worldwide today, an increase of 37% over the last twenty years. Singapore alone has seen a 41% increase of foreign-born migrants between 1990 and 2010.

Wei Leng Tay is herself a part of this migration. She is a citizen of Singapore, but her Chinese father is from Malaysia. Her Chinese mother has many relatives in Penang. Like many of those she photographs, Wei Leng also has family in China. Recognition of these connections reveals her project to be a personal exploration of that broadly human tale of generational transformation, where the elders are more likely to hold on to the language and customs of their ancestors, while the young embrace the new. Most Chinese Singaporeans in their 20s do not speak their family’s traditional dialect and many have broken from their traditional religious roots. Wei Leng Tay tells her tale from the perspective of a generation beyond the upheaval of the physical migration, but not fully beyond its effects. The first generation settles in. The second generation becomes more integrated, finding a balance between traditions of the culture left behind and those of the adopted land. The third generation, her generation, has the perspective and distance to take a critical look at this balance. Like the young the world over, they chafe at their parents’ ways. But their sense of separation is more acute. Even as these young adults and their burgeoning families still often live with their parents, their outlook has taken on a new far more expansive and challenging global cast defined not just by other Asian States but by Australia, Europe, Canada, and America. Some of them have studied abroad. Wei Leng Tay gained her Bachelor of Sciences degree at McGill University in Montreal. She is a young professional like many of the young adults she photographs — artists, designers, photographers, and writers. Like these subjects she is a striver with a modestly secure financial situation and tied to the internet. Like them, she struggles with the prejudices of her parents’ generation, and the sense of separation brought by her more global outlook. In that acute sensation of separation, she positions herself through her images of young and old alike as the empathetic watcher and recorder of stasis and change. Rather than break away from her roots, she acknowledges them with openness and respect, valuing them even as she questions them.

The occasional formal studio portraits of ancestors gracing the walls behind some of the older sitters like Ah Biang bring reminder of how thoroughly times have changed. Wei Leng Tay’s new color portraits are keepsakes informed by a new far more informal outlook. Here, the surroundings she depicts are just as important as her sitters. Shelves filled with clocks or action figures, or friends playing Guitar Hero, each unveil personal passions not considered appropriate to portraiture of the past. As the images shift from Penang to Kuala Lumpur and Singapore they also deliver visceral reminder of the economic and cultural disparities between various urban areas and between the photographer’s relatives and her friends. Rock band posters posted adjacent to funerary lanterns become symbols of the speed and disruptions of these changes. Photographs of young parents with their toddlers raise questions of how the fast encroaching globalization of life will affect those relationships twenty years down the line, and what further historical roots will be lost.

What these photographs do not easily convey, are the social tensions and ethnic prejudices that so deeply inscribe life in Singapore and Malaysia. The depictions of Chinese schools in Penang remind audiences there of segregation hidden to outsiders. The portraits of young women of mixed ethnicities instantly raise thoughts of conflict to those viewing them from within these cultures. The tensions of intersecting languages and the struggle to find a common means of comfortable communication, even within families, likewise cannot be conveyed visually. Wei Leng Tay is too sympathetic to her sitters to allow ethnic tensions to overtly dominate. Instead, she allows these tensions to remain just under the surface, more truly reflecting how they do just that in daily life.

In an art world driven over these past ten years by a passion for photographing the other, it is refreshing to see someone photographing her own life, not to trumpet its distinctive outsider status but to try to understand its intergenerational dynamic. Wei Leng Tay does so not only with sincerity, but gentle acuity. These photographs may not help her resolve her relationship to her family’s history, bridge the powerful disjunctions between her fellow young adults and their parents, or mend the deeply engrained prejudices in Singaporean and Malaysian society, but that they open these doors is enough.