Looking at Photomedia Artist Wei Leng Tay’s ‘The Other Shore’

– Olivier Krischer interviewed by Annette Liu and Esther Carlin

As you enter Wei Leng Tay’s exhibition ‘The Other Shore’, you are drawn in by the darkness. The space is contained, and the dark grey walls allow the lightboxes mounted on the wall, and in frames on the ground, to glow. Recordings of interviews with the subjects play softly, and are dispersed throughout the room. This exhibition seems to ask of its audience to slow down, to look, and to seek to understand. We met with the curator of the exhibition, Olivier Krischer, to find out more about the stories behind the photos.

Esther: Can you tell us a little bit about this exhibition? What cultural context do you bring to the work in terms of your own research and background?

Olivier: The project really comes about because I had met Wei Leng when I was living in Hong Kong. I was there for about a year, working. She has worked in journalism, and in art publishing, so I knew her from that professional world. I was familiar with her past work, more on Hong Kong and South East Asia, as well as some residencies that she has done, in Japan, for example. This project came out of a conversation that we should work together on something– maybe a book, maybe an exhibition, or maybe both. And then over the 2014-15 period, she developed this project, which specifically dealt with mainland migrants in Hong Kong, which is a topic that, having been in Hong Kong, and then obviously because of the protests, seemed more and more timely. I really liked the fact that this was an issue that a lot of people could connect to, they may have seen in the media, but it seemed to offer a totally different perspective, because it was more local, it was more nuanced and specific, asking about individual people, about a community, which isn’t the way the media approaches it.

Annette: Is Wei Leng planning on showing the work elsewhere?

O: Our idea is to try and take this elsewhere and we talked about that from the beginning. In some ways, this was a project that we were interested in doing anywhere, and I pushed for it to happen here. Now we’re interested in trying to take it to the region. The work speaks perhaps more directly to audiences in places like Singapore, obviously Hong Kong – some of the work has been shown in Hong Kong – and also mainland China.

A: I just ask because I think a lot of the background story and the whole discrimination towards mainlanders– this sentiment is very present in Taiwan, where I come from, and amongst Taiwanese people.

O: Yeah that’s really interesting. Some people have asked questions like ‘where does this [sentiment] come from?’ and Wei Leng comments on the fact that in communities like Singapore and in Taiwan, as well as in Hong Kong, the idea of a kind of condescension towards the mainland, has been quite typical in popular culture since the 1980’s. There are lots of films for example where you have ‘communist backward mainlanders’ who don’t understand what the outside world is like.

These stereotypes are certainly not the truth, but skirt around it in the sense that for a lot of people in mainland China, they didn’t have these experiences and they didn’t have this market of international connections. And yet, long after this has changed materially, people’s perceptions have certainly remained the same, and if anything have hardened.

A comment Wei Leng made is that she sees this as having become politicised more recently. She doesn’t think that it’s originally really been a political issue, whereas now because of the so-called rise of China economically and politically, that has meant that this stereotype of mainlanders is also conflated with people’s attitudes towards the Chinese government.

E: Correct me if I’m wrong, but some of these individual stories of migration actually span generations though, they are not a recent phenomenon?

O: Yes, that is one of the interesting things that the project does, in that it tries to ask what these different histories of migration look like. So the way Wei Leng works is that she starts with people she knows who have mainland connections, and it’s a little bit like in Taiwan, in the background everyone always knows whose family are originally from the mainland, or whose families are local, even if things are kind of mixed now. Some people have been in Hong Kong for decades. There’s one particular person who’s from Shanghai for example originally. She sees herself as from Shanghai, despite having been in Hong Kong for decades, and she doesn’t identify as ‘local’. So self-identification comes into it a lot too.

A: Yes that’s like my dad’s parents because they migrated.

O: Whereas there are other people whose family have actually migrated when they themselves were quite young. Like one guy, his parent’s don’t speak Cantonese, which is definitely the dominant language still in Hong Kong, and is now more and more a source of local cultural politics. So he speaks Cantonese but his parents speak Hokkien from Fujian province. He thinks that he’s totally local and he hates mainlanders, and he totally identifies in that way. In the conversations that Wei Leng has had with him, she’s said ‘well, but hang on, what about your parents? They’re kind of part of this community that you’re saying you don’t associate with, or that you don’t identify with’, and he’s like ‘oh, that doesn’t matter.’

I think that’s one of the things that is actually quite nice, and really particular to something like an art project, is that it doesn’t make sense. A lot of these people’s narratives, it’s kind of messy, and that’s fine. Which is something that I think you don’t get in the media or academia. You tend to get a position, which is clear and concrete.

A: Yes, certainly. Is there a particular message Wei Leng wants people to take out of the exhibition though? Does she hope to change people’s perspectives in a particular way? Because I guess these are images, and it’s not overly evident because there are no captions, and even with the audio transcripts it’s very general. I suppose for me, it slowly moves away from the theme of boundaries and tensions and into a far more personal space.

O: Well to be honest, I want to avoid talking for her, but the way she has described it to me, is that the project began with her being interested in that political tension. Very quickly, she felt however, and this is again going from what she said so I can feel comfortable saying it, that there was only so much you can say about this issue. And in fact what people seemed to be more interested in talking about were their backgrounds and their own personal experiences, and that’s what comes out in a lot of the transcripts.

So, she hasn’t selected images because she feels like they totally symbolise this person’s experience of discrimination in Hong Kong. It’s not really about that anymore. It’s more about ‘who are these people? Why are they here? What are their backstories?’ You do get a sense from their environments, particularly because Wei Leng asks people to choose where they are going to be photographed, so they photograph in familiar places to the subject, you get a sense that there’s something about this environment, which is saying something about them. One example is an image with a guy and a girl, and he’s kind of looking at the girl, and they’re in this family style apartment, and there’s a lot on the walls and in the background which is kid’s stuff. The family has actually been going to Hong Kong, back and forth, for decades because they have a business on both sides of the internal border. So there are these longer backstories, you know, very different to tension or politics, or simple identity in terms of national identities. If everybody has a particular story, how or where do you draw the line in terms of what this border means? For some people that border is real, and it’s a part of their identity. For other people, it’s not at all– they live on both sides of the border, and their families are all over the place. And that’s something that I think which connects a lot to Wei Leng’s previous work, looking at her own family. She is Singaporean but her family is originally from Malaysia, originally from Southern China, and she also has family in Thailand, and in Hong Kong.