Nicholas Tay
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In All Under Heaven, the body is an infinite continent. For me, it is a terrain to be discovered, negotiated, claimed, and surrendered. It is both border and homeland at once. It is profoundly ours.
Growing up as a Chinese immigrant in Canada, I learned to see myself through Western media and found myself lacking. I was too small, too quiet, too un-masculine, foreign and undesirable. The West, with its muscular heroes and celebration of individual emotional power, was seductive in its promise of visibility and agency.
To belong felt like a bargain: freedom in exchange for your truth.
These works hold that tension. Rendered in stark monochrome and wrapped in saturated cultural pattern, the body becomes a site where assimilation and cultural identity press against each other in transformative friction. At times the garment reads as armor; at others, as skin. Abstraction interrupts like doubt, or like history insisting on its presence. -
I did not always love the body - my body. I have known its shame and fracture. But this series does not end in erasure. It moves beyond “either/or.” Instead of choosing between East and West, masculinity and tenderness, tradition and autonomy, I ask whether they can coexist without dominance.
Some works lean toward beauty as a statement of arrival. As the laying down of burden. Here, the body is no longer a battleground, but a universe capable of holding contradiction without fear. This is where what was once “wrong” becomes authored, integrated, and wholly mine.
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Artist Bio: Nicholas Tay (b. 1977) is a multidisciplinary artist of ....
Nicholas Tay (b. 1977) is a multidisciplinary artist of Singaporean-Chinese descent whose work navigates the emotional terrain of identity, migration, and ancestral culture. Drawing from his own lived experience as part of the Chinese diaspora, Tay uses figuration to explore the complexities of longing and belonging. Figures who exist in liminal, overlooked, or misunderstood spaces often serve as the central protagonists and act as a gateway for the viewer into a shared experience.
Working primarily in drawing, painting, and photography, Tay blends expressive mark-making with refined draftsmanship. His figures, rendered in stark monochrome, are layered with bursts of saturated color, floral motifs, or loose, gestural abstraction. This acts as a visual tension that mirrors the internal negotiations of diaspora life: strength and vulnerability, silence and expression, absence and desire.
Whether portraying migrant workers at rest, queer couples claiming visibility, or familial moments heavy with unspoken emotion, Tay’s work foregrounds tenderness as a radical act. He is particularly interested in the quiet power of those who are rarely centered - giving form to stories that resist reduction, sentimentality, or stereotype.
Tay received his formal training at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California. He currently divides his time between Hong Kong and his studio in Vancouver, British Columbia, located on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy ̓əm (Musqueam), sel ̓ íl ̓witulh (Tsleil-Waututh), and skwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) peoples. His work has been exhibited in Vancouver, Seoul, Bangkok, and Rome.