Rae-Yen Song Solo Exhibition

Preview 14 November 7pm to 9pm

Tramway presents the most ambitious solo exhibition to date of Glasgow based artist Rae-Yen Song 宋瑞渊 (b. Edinburgh,1993). Song is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice is an ever-evolving exercise in world-building, informed by personal ancestral mythologies, Daoism, diasporic-futurism, family ritual, more-than-human politics, and science fact-fiction.

Rae-Yen Song will transform Tramway’s vast gallery space into a sub-aquatic world shaped according to the ancestral logics of the Song family, which serves simultaneously as a spectacle, a memorial and a refuge. Weaving history, memory and imagination, the project will immerse visitors in a phantasmagoric watery abyss populated by ancestral characters. The exhibition includes an array of newly commissioned artworks in sculpture, textiles, printmaking, sound, light and moving image. These artworks are entangled in the architectural embrace of an immense, ethereal creature which stretches out across the gallery space, drawn from the artist’s own heritage and family mythology.  

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.  

CREDITS

The exhibition by Rae Ye Song is co-commissioned by Tramway, Glasgow and FACT, Liverpool.

The film installation ≈qipond≈ [working title] is 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 ○○○○, 2025 was commissioned by Creative Folkstone for the Folkstone Triennale, 25. 

Tramway is supported by Glasgow Life and Creative Scotland. FVU and FACT are supported by Arts Council England.

Collaborators: Song Family, Kiera Tucker ASCUS, Art and Science, Edinburgh and Flora Yin Wong

_______________
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.

Image
Rae-Yen Song - song dynasty OOOO, 2025 (Folkestone Triennial, 2025) . Photo - Thierry Bal