Between arriving and leaving (2019) begins, as with many of Tay’s work, with the personal: in this case, the artist’s family archive of photographic slides. Here, the photographic slide in question is an aerial view of an unidentified location, somewhere between Malaysia and Singapore, shot in the early 1970s. The ambiguity of the location remains important to the artist, even as the slide is magnified to invite scrutiny and speculations. However, the slide’s dating represents a critical period between the personal (i.e. her parents moving across spaces for work and their early marriage) and the geopolitical (i.e. the early years of nation-building). From the outset then, this work represents the artist’s long interest in personal memories tied to migration patterns, their histories and their politics in the region. Formally, the slide is mediated and distributed through standardised A3 papers – theoretically printable by any standard office printer. Taken together as a grid, the work really points to prescribed systems and standardisations we live by. Here, we can also consider how the postwar decades marked a sustained period of standardisations around the world (e.g. containersation, TV broadcast signals, paper sizes). Such standardisations have of course been instrumental for globalisation, and are thus often credited for creating the impression of a flat seamless world. Upon closer inspection of the work, however, this seamlessness is disrupted through the curling of the paper prints, thereby creating a surface of uneven distribution.
