Rae-Yen Song

•~TUA~• 大眼 •~MAK~•

An installation shot. In the foreground is a textile work that resembles a family crest, within the crest is blue, green, and red dyed materials with embroidered flame like shapes and smoke. In the foreground of the image is the tencales of the octopuss installation. The room is dark and lit with purple and yellow hues.

A suspended sculptural piece. There is a range of materials including fabric, paper mache, and lighting. The papermache displays vase like heards that run throughout the body of the work. Under these heads is fabric draping of pink and blue.

An overhead installation show showing several fabric pieces of green, purple, pinks, and yellows. These sculptural works make the body of an octopus like shape, the end of each tentacle is a green hollowed oval with mask like features.

Dates and Opening times

EXHIBITION

Fri 5 Jun - Sun 9 Aug

Fri 5 Jun 10am - 5pm, 7pm - 9:30pm for Preview

Sat 6 Jun, 11am - 6pm

Sun 7 Jun, 11am - 5pm

8 - 12, 14 - 19, 21 Jun, 12pm - 5pm

Sat 13 and 20 Jun, 12pm - 6pm

PERFORMANCE

Fri 5 Jun, 8pm

Sat 6 Jun, 4pm

7, 20 - 21 Jun, 3pm

Free, drop-in

Venue

Tramway, 25 Albert Drive, G41 2PE

Participants

Rae-Yen Song

Presented by

Tramway

Supported by

Tramway, Glasgow and FACT, Liverpool. The video installation 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 sculptural costume song dynasty ○○○○ was commissioned by Creative Folkestone for 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.

Accessiblity

Level Access, Step Free: The venue has ramped or level access and/or lifts to upper floors

Toilets: The venue has toilets available for visitors

Accessible Toilets: The venue has a wheelchair accessible toilet

Gender Neutral Toilets: The venue has toilets not separated by gender or sex

Baby Change: The venue has baby changing facilities

Refreshments: There is a cafe or somewhere you can purchase refreshments

For •~TUA~• 大眼 •~MAK~•, Rae-Yen Song 宋瑞渊 has transformed the vast Tramway gallery into a spectral abyss. Drawing on ancestral mythologies, Daoism, more-than-human politics, and science fact-ﬁction, the exhibition ingests visitors into an eternal night: an entangled ecology of microscopic life, ancestral energy, and environmental flux.

A sprawling creature occupies the gallery, which Rae-Yen sees as an embodiment of tua mak 大眼 – a relative known only through family myth, who drowned at sea in 1950s Singapore. Rae-Yen imagines the watery decomposition of tua mak’s body and its consumption by innumerable others, conjuring tua mak as a dispersed life-system, cycling eternally through continuous change and perpetual migration.

During Glasgow International, •~TUA~• 大眼 •~MAK~• will host a live operatic performance – a cycle of decomposition and regeneration, unfolding across the course of the festival. Performers, musicians, and vocalists will take up Rae-Yen’s sculptural and textile works as instruments and costumes, telling the exhibition’s life-death-life story as a musical communion of humans, spirits, and other species.