Glasgow International Festival of Contemporary Art

•~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.
Rae-Yen Song 宋瑞渊 - •~TUA~• 大眼 •~MAK~•, 2025.

Courtesy Tramway. Photo by Keith Hunter.
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.
Rae-Yen Song 宋瑞渊 - •~TUA~• 大眼 •~MAK~•, 2025.

Courtesy Tramway. Photo by Keith Hunter.
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.
Rae-Yen Song 宋瑞渊 - •~TUA~• 大眼 •~MAK~•, 2025.

Courtesy Tramway. Photo by Keith Hunter.
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, 13 - 14, 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, watery abyss. Rae-Yen’s practice is an ever-evolving exercise in world-building, informed by ancestral mythologies, Daoism, family ritual, more-than-human politics, and science fact-fiction. The exhibition immerses visitors in an eternal night: an entangled ecology of microscopic life, ancestral energy, and environmental flux.

Rae-Yen imagines a sprawling creature as an embodiment of tua mak 大眼 (“big eyes” in the Teochew Chinese dialect)—a relative known only through family memory and myth, who drowned at sea aged thirteen in 1950s Singapore. Here, tua mak is conjured as a dispersed lifeform, cycling eternally in a process of continuous change and perpetual migration.

During Glasgow International, •~TUA~• 大眼 •~MAK~• will reawaken, becoming a host for a live operatic decomposition which unfolds across the course of 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.