GLASGOW.- Rae-Yen Song has transformed Tramway’s vast gallery space into a sub-aquatic world shaped according to the ancestral logics of the Song family, which serves simultaneously as spectacle, memorial and refuge. The exhibition immerses visitors in a phantasmagoric watery abyss populated by ancestral characters, and includes an array of newly-commissioned artworks in ceramic, glass, costume, sound, light and moving image. These artworks are entangled within the body of an immense microbeast, an ethereal creature stretching across the gallery space, drawn from the artist’s heritage and family mythology.

Song sees this creature as an embodiment of tua mak 大眼 ( “big eyes” in the Teochew dialect) - a relative, known only through familial memories and myths, who drowned at sea aged thirteen, in 1950s Singapore. The artist imagines a body being eaten and excreted by innumerable others in this watery grave; tua mak becomes a dispersed lifeform, cycling eternally in a process of continuous change and perpetual migration. Song also draws on the origin tale of Pangu, the creation figure in Chinese mythology and Daoism whose decomposing body became earthly features such as mountains, water, air, plants and creatures.

Shifting light, and an ever-evolving soundscape developed in collaboration with sound artist Flora Yin Wong, create an immersive, theatrical environment. The layered, polyphonic score merges the artists’ field recordings with the amplified echoes of pond-life. Sound and light are controlled by the microscopic lifeforms at the core of the installation, living in the Song family pond. The pond itself has been transported from Edinburgh, and occupies a tank within a sculptural shrine at the centre of the exhibition. It nestles within the microbeast’s body, serving as a heart, or perhaps a brain - the living nucleus of the exhibition.

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 the 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 and Creative Arts.

The sculpture song dynasty ○○○○ was commissioned by Creative Folkestone for the Folkestone Triennial 2025.