Sebastian Mary Tay’s practice examines the existential conditions of image-making in a technological culture increasingly structured by artificial intelligence, simulation and computational mediation. Working across photography, moving image, installation and drawing, he is interested in what remains of the photographic image when its traditional relation to reality, evidence and human perception becomes unstable.

Landscape is a recurring structure within this enquiry. Earlier works involved constructing miniature landscapes by hand and photographing them as seemingly encountered environments; more recent works extend this concern into digitally mediated, synthetic and computational spaces. Across these shifts, landscape becomes less a representation of nature than a site through which questions of worldhood, perception and technological mediation can be examined.

Recent works bring photographic and synthetic imagery, natural environments, screens, glitches and material processes into proximity. He is less interested in determining whether an image is real or artificial than in examining how images construct, disclose and increasingly participate in producing the worlds through which reality is experienced and understood.

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Sebastian Mary Tay’s When the Mountains Speak Through Empty Swirls is presented at the 10th Singapore International Photography Festival as part of Shifting Images: Photography from Singapore 2000–2025, under In Circles.