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White Clouds

Sebastian Mary Tay

FOST Gallery, Singapore

Exhibition Text

Sebastian Mary Tay

White Clouds proffers a set of propositions on the culture of contemporary imaging as a possible condition for ontological disclosure, rather than a mere aesthetic phenomenon. Images, whether they be photographic, computational, cinematic, or vernacular, now operate within digital circuits and platform infrastructures that privilege dissemination, prediction and redundancy.

Under such conditions, the image is tasked less with revealing a world than with performing a function within a system: it becomes operable before it is meaningful. The works in this exhibition test how such operability bears upon worldhood, attention, and time, as well as questions the kinds of practice that could reconfigure these conditions without recourse to medium nostalgia or antitechnological moralism.

Within platform ecologies, novelty is metrical rather than evental. Referential claims (index, trace, presence) cede priority to operational metrics (legibility, engagement, rank). The consequence does not just present a crisis of “truth”, but more significantly, a contradiction to the possibility of existential meaning: appearances succeed one another without consolidating into understanding; proximity proliferates without reliably producing relation. Social media culture renders such tendencies exemplary here, fragments circulate as affective triggers decoupled from embodied encounter, while the landscape, increasingly synthesised or procedurally altered, functions as texture rather than place.

The various series presented in the larger gallery space, When the Mountains Speak Through Empty Swirls, EUDAIMONIA and They Say…, are situated within this regime; they diagnose neither pathology nor cure, but delineate the enabling constraints that preconfigure what can appear, be remembered, and be judged.

Error and malfunction are treated here as modes of disclosure. The Glitch is neither style nor ornament; it instead marks the seam where the infrastructural truth of the image becomes visible - compression artefacts, training biases, temporal stitching, and the small failures of inference that a frictionless feed (the image) is designed to conceal. Such interruptions stage an interval in which orientation, judgement, thoughts, and thus, agency, become possible again. The aim is procedural: to convert breakdown into a practicable pause, a critical delay against the compulsion to resolve, optimise, or forget. In this respect the exhibition approaches technical mediation in a Heideggerian key by cultivating practices that could re-orient images and their production toward a non-instrumental mode of disclosure. Language is placed under the same pressure. Existentially

Essential and Essentially Existential articulate a reversible proposition that withholds semantic confinements, refusing both guarantee and arbitrariness. Nonessential Existence Existing Essentially, a durational writing performance, extends this refusal: iterative inscription tends towards opacity, demonstrating that accumulation does not equal understanding.

Meaning is treated as a function of how problems are held open: how indeterminacy is sustained without collapsing into cynicism or euphemism, rather than as a surplus yielded by greater quantities of text or data. These works consequently address discursivity and image-production as co-implicated operations within the same technical horizon. Care is proposed as method here. It is not an afterthought or a

moral gloss but a structuring discipline that sets the conditions under which disclosure (aletheia) can occur: calibration, maintenance, repetition, restraint.

White Clouds, the moving image of a constructed aquascape projected on the inner gallery wall, is offered thus as a caredependent ecology: fully technical in its means (i.e., filtration, CO₂ injection, spectral control, nutrient regimes) yet oriented to letting beings appear in their own time. It withholds montage, score, and didactic cue in favour of continuity and duration. The result is a different comportment within the same technological order: an experiment in attention that treats silence and minor variation as conditions for meaning, rather than as deficits of our attention. The title’s allusion to Nuvole Bianche by the Italian composer Ludovico Einaudi matters only insofar as it names the register at stake: repetition without crescendo, insistence without spectacle. Temporality is thus central. Platform time contracts interval into

a continuous present in which retention and protention are attenuated; memory becomes mere residue through endless scrolling, and the future, a predictive curve. The works presented here counter this contraction by insisting upon existential time, finitude as the horizon within which significance arises at all. Images here are tasked with binding the already-been to the not-yet, past time and future time, rather than servicing an eternal here and now. The aquascape’s non-human rhythms, growth, sway, shoaling, pearling, foreground duration without spectacle, enabling a form of looking that is neither anaesthetised nor agitated, and that reconnects attention with responsibility.

The exhibition’s architecture is therefore critical and argumentative without being prescriptive. It stages two modalities of imaging and, correspondingly, two modalities of attention: one governed by acceleration, redundancy, and the management of surface appearances; the other organised around duration, maintenance, and the refusal to pre-programme affect.

The contribution here is modest but exacting: to show that existential stakes have not evaporated with the ascendancy of generative systems and platform governance; they have been displaced to the level of conditions. Reconfigure those conditions, technical, temporal, attentional, and images can still carry weight. White Clouds does not propose resolution. It offers a protocol: inhabit the system critically; expose the seam; resist descriptive excess; organise time; and treat care as the enabling constraint under which a world may yet appear.

Artist Profile

Sebastian Mary Tay is an interdisciplinary artist and educator with a Doctor of Philosophy in Art History from Ragusa, Italy (2025) and a Master of Research from Glasgow, United Kingdom (2016). His individual research examines the existential foundation of the photographic medium within the context of contemporary artificial intelligence imaging visual culture.

Tay’s artworks have been exhibited internationally, notably in exhibitions such as Superhuman Expedition, United Kingdom; Pixel Paradise, Singapore; the 8th Singapore International Photography Festival, Singapore; Glasgow Open House Arts Festival, UK; Frame & Frequency, USA; NIDA International Photography Symposium, Lithuania; Oscillations: Adventures in Metamodernism, Singapore; Utopia – What’s Yours?, UK; and The Society of Scottish Artists’ annual exhibitions. His works have also been shown on multiple occasions at The Royal Scottish Academy, where he received the Royal Scottish Academy Latimer Award. Tay was additionally awarded the Royal Glasgow Institute Prize. In recent years, he has collaborated with Meta Open Arts on diverse projects, including site-specific photographic installations and an augmented reality filter developed in partnership with Messenger. In 2022, he was awarded the Ngee Ann Young Promising Artist Award.

Tay’s teaching areas encompass art history, contextual studies, contemporary art practice, critical and contemporary theory, photography history and theory, as well as photographic and other lens-based practices. He has been invited as a guest speaker and lecturer by numerous institutions internationally, including City of Glasgow College, UK; The Royal Scottish Academy, UK; Mount Florida Studios, UK; the University of the West of Scotland, UK; DECK, Singapore; Nanyang Technological University, Singapore; and Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, Singapore. He currently holds adjunct lecturer positions at the University of the Arts Singapore, Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, LASALLE College of the Arts, and Nanyang Technological University.

Tay is based between Singapore and Korea, and is actively producing new works and preparing forthcoming exhibitions in Singapore. He is an elected Professional Member of The Society of Scottish Artists (SSA).

When the Mountains Speak Through Empty Swirls I 2025

Giclée print on lustre paper

Edition of 5 + 1 Artist’s Proof + 1 Exhibition Print

H75 x W100 cm (image)

When the Mountains Speak Through Empty Swirls II 2025

Giclée print on lustre paper

Edition of 5 + 1 Artist’s Proof + 1 Exhibition Print H75 x W100 cm (image)

When the Mountains Speak Through Empty Swirls III 2025

Giclée print on lustre paper

Edition of 5 + 1 Artist’s Proof + 1 Exhibition Print H75 x W100 cm (image)

When the Mountains Speak Through Empty Swirls IV 2025

Giclée print on lustre paper

Edition of 5 + 1 Artist’s Proof + 1 Exhibition Print H75 x W100 cm (image)

EUDAIMONIA I 2025

Single-channel HD video (00:43:00)

Edition of 3 + 2 Artist’s Proofs

Video still

EUDAIMONIA II 2025

Single-channel HD video (00:43:35)

Edition of 3 + 2 Artist’s Proofs

Video still

EUDAIMONIA III 2025

Single-channel HD video (00:45:05)

Edition of 3 + 2 Artist’s Proofs

Video still

EUDAIMONIA IV 2025

Single-channel HD video (00:45:00)

Edition of 3 + 2 Artist’s Proofs

Video still

EUDAIMONIA V 2025

Single-channel HD video (00:45:00)

Edition of 3 + 2 Artist’s Proofs

Video still