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.