Rae-Yen Song 宋瑞渊 - •~TUA~• 大眼 •~MAK~•
Tramway presents the most ambitious solo exhibition to date of Glasgow-based artist Rae-Yen Song 宋瑞渊 (b. Edinburgh,1993).
Open Wednesdays to Fridays 12pm to 5pm
Saturdays 12pm to 6pm
Sundays 12pm to 5pm
Closed Mondays and Tuesdays
For Rae-Yen Song 宋瑞渊 (b. Edinburgh,1993; lives and works in Glasgow), the immigrant experience of flux and resilience gives rise to an ongoing exercise in speculative worlding. Song's work shifts and changes as it tunes in to personal ancestral mythologies, Daoism, more-than-human politics, science fiction and entangled ecologies.
Tramway’s gallery space has been transformed by Song into a vast, darkened abyss, hovering somewhere unknown between the deep sea and the skies above. At its heart glows a pond, home to a living ecosystem of plant and microscopic animal life, which quietly controls the entire environment. From this pond, a whole world unfurls. Its contours are shaped by a delicately immense ‘microbeast’ which floats throughout the entire gallery. The microbeast’s tentacles become tunnel-like walkways for audiences to explore, and the central mantle is a sanctum in which to dwell. It is imagined by Song as an embodiment of tua mak 眼 - a lost ancestor.
The broader world which it inhabits emerges from a rich matrix of ideas, in which the ecology of the pond combines with Song’s family mythologies, digital vision analysis systems, and multiple creative collaborations to form a complex entanglement of life. The artefacts bound up in this entanglement are presented as a network of costumes, tools, and energies, drifting throughout the spectral environment, like celestial~oceanic soot.
Many of these artefacts have been hand-crafted by the artist, who sees their intricate making both as the creation of a tangible, personal heritage, and as an act of reverence in respect of ancestors past, present and future. They are manifestations of a process of making-as-thinking, in which countless microdecisions taken at an intimate material scale (the width of a stitch, the shape of a ceramic orifice, the junction of two pieces of willow) compound to create an entire macro-world.
Song considers the installation to be an expansive system of entangled energies - not an image of a system, but an actual, working infrastructure of connections and transfers. The ecosystem of the pond controls the exhibition’s ever-changing lighting state, and constantly plays its own electronic musical instrument - subtly imposing itself on our experience of the environment. The human is not prioritised here. Ancestral presences drift and are as much a part of the entangled system as anything that we might think we understand. It is an open system of interrelation, between the seen and the unseen - microorganisms, atoms, vibrations, spirits. As such, the exhibition is also conceived as a space of rehearsal, to and from which other energies will be introduced and distributed. This distribution will come in the form of a live programme of public events – Offerings – taking place over the course of the exhibition, which will entangle new bodies in the ecosystem of •~TUA~• 大眼 •~MAK~• through conversations, performances, workshops and rituals.
Central to the exhibition is the figure of tua mak (大眼; “big eyes” in the Teochew dialect), an ancestor - known only through Song’s familial memories and myths - who drowned at sea in Singapore at the age of thirteen. Rae-Yen imagines the watery decomposition of one body and its consumption by innumerable others, and conjures tua mak as a dispersed lifeform, cycling eternally in a process of continuous change and perpetual migration. The artist also draws on the origin tale of Pangu, the primordial being and creation figure in Chinese mythology and Daoism whose decomposing body became earthly features such as mountains, water, land, air, plants and creatures.
A series of large sculptures and built elements take a physical form which Rae-Yen sees as an embodiment of tua mak - a microbeast~pagoda, the enormous creature that fills the gallery space. Its tentacles become tunnel-like walkways for audiences to explore, and the central mantle is a sanctum to inhabit. Shifting light, and an ever-evolving soundscape created in collaboration with sound artist Flora Yin Wong, turn a physical installation into an immersive, theatrical environment, evoking a distant, dissonant world.
These audio-visual elements are controlled by the microscopic lifeforms at the core of the installation - an aquatic culture transported from the Song family pond in Edinburgh. The pond itself occupies a tank within a sculptural shrine at the centre of the exhibition, nestled within the microbeast’s body - at its heart, or perhaps serving as its brain. Here, visitors will be able to dwell in communion with the living nucleus of the exhibition.
Eight covered tentacular walkways will undulate out from this central sanctum, each extremity masked with the sculpted manifestation of an ancestral character drawn from Song’s visual mythology. The ancestors look upon a series of animations that appear nearby as shimmering apparitions, floating within a series of mouth-blown glass sculptures. These bioluminescent dancers are imaginings of the lifeforms within the pond, a deification of the microscopic beyond-human kin through which tua mak is dispersed, and with which Song feels an ancestral entanglement.
Suspended throughout the space at varying heights, like drifting lifeforms, are a series of sculptural costumes. Pulleys allow them to be raised or lowered, and therefore to be accessed at specific points during the exhibition. The costumes serve performative happenings including a public procession, with members of the Song family bearing a 5-metre-long puppet, a descendant of polychaeta - marine worms (watch film of this performance, below). Another is an operatic aria; a non-linguistic exploration through migrant voices of the tale of tua mak’s death, a mother’s loss, and the continuous flow of new, other life imagined through the chimerical ecology of the exhibition.
A series of sculptural artefacts have been made as offerings - to tua mak, and to the ancestral pond. They also serve as props for a series of programmed events. Devised and crafted as tools and instruments, each devotional artefact enables an invited teacher to host a gathering which allows participants to imagine and rehearse a radically more hopeful future. In use, the artefacts become animated, lively, musical. In various ways, events taking place in the exhibition are guided by the tenets of Daoism, which is aligned with the way of nature and which flows through the practices of magic, healing and teaching. This programme is animating the installation with a dynamic series of events taking place across the exhibition run. In essence, the exhibition becomes a theatre for meditating on alternative ways of being, in which the prospect of life can be built from the abyss of death.
Gallery plan and information
This 8-page guide to •~TUA~• 大眼 •~MAK~• includes an introduction, an exhibition map and notes on individual artworks.
This is a PDF.
CREDITS
•~TUA~• 大眼 •~MAK~• is co-commissioned by Tramway, Glasgow and FACT, Liverpool.
The exhibition includes an installation of animations produced by Film and Video Umbrella and Tramway. Co-commissioned by FVU, Tramway, FACT, and Advanced Research Centre at the University of Glasgow, and supported by Thinking Culture, a cultural programme from the University of Glasgow’s School of Culture & Creative Arts.
The sculpture song dynasty ○○○○ was commissioned by Creative Folkestone for the Folkestone Triennial 2025.
Textile printing was supported by Print Clan’s Artist in Residence Programme (2024) at Print Clan CIC, supported by the National Lottery through Creative Scotland.
Tramway is supported by Glasgow Life and Creative Scotland. FVU and FACT are supported by Arts Council England. This exhibition is supported by Henry Moore Foundation Grants.
Collaborators: Song family (human and pond), Michael Barr, Kiera Tucker (ASCUS Art and Science) and Flora Yin Wong
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ACCESS
It is our aim to make Tramway as accessible as possible for all our visitors. Download our Gallery Visitor Pack with this link. A hard copy of this pack is also available from our Box Office Reception desk on request.
All installation photos by Keith Hunter