Meet the Artist: Rae-Yen Song

Rae-Yen Song studied at the Glasgow School of Art, graduating with a BA (Hons) in Sculpture and Environmental Art. Since then, she has produced several impressive exhibitions, including a solo show at CCA Glasgow titled ‘life-bestowing cadaverous sooooooooooot’, and further presentations at Dundee Contemporary Arts (2021) and FACT Liverpool (2022). She was also shortlisted for the 2022 Margaret Tait Award.

Rae-Yen Song is a multidisciplinary artist, utilizing mediums such as sculpture, installation, performance, printmaking, drawing, animation, and video. She often combines multiple forms within her work to produce dramatic and complex installations.

Rejecting Western aesthetics and narrative, Song draws on East and South-East Asian ancestral mythology to build distinctly experimental, fantastical, and exciting worlds. These alternate worlds suspend notions of space, time, and reality, allowing her to reconstruct a sense of self freed from restrictive cultural, racial, and gender-based stereotypes. Central to her work is the immigrant experience, where she interrogates ideas of diaspora, belonging, and otherness. She sees the immigrant as “a basis of wisdom and resilience; the idea of otherness, and the foreigner being an outsider…growing in hostile environments and being able to thrive in them.”

This world also provides space for her ancestral family history to be voiced and celebrated, giving presence in the collective space to those who have come before us. This interest was sparked by a visit to Singapore, where she became aware of the perpetual spiritual presence of ancestors, these “lively ghosts” that are highly revered and attentively cared for. However, Song avoids direct representation, leaving a sense of ambiguity and the fantastical, so these humanesque figures remain elusive and impersonal. She states this is because: “My ancestry, my family, and my heritage is also fragmented, so it’s not this verbatim retelling. I’m not interested in just a retelling of history. I’m more interested in the gaps, the things that aren’t recorded or that exist either orally or through the imagination…there’s energy … Because I don’t want to put words in your mouth… So maybe it’s more about getting closer to them, a dance.”

Song’s practice is also influenced by Daoism, an interest encouraged by her father. Its core tenets of compassion, humility, balance, interconnectedness with everything, resonate throughout her work. She describes Daoism as an exploration of the cosmos and the abyssal powers that we can’t comprehend, yet we are a part of. We’ve distanced ourselves so that we don’t feel entwined, we don’t feel those vibrations, which I think so many other organisms and other non-human beings fundamentally and powerfully feel […]” Art, for her, becomes an attempt to reconnect with these vibrations, “to have a bodily embrace with it and feel ourselves as nature, and therefore care for it.” This philosophy is embodied in Song dynasty ooo, the piece shown at Lakeside Arts. Here, ancestors are portrayed as interconnected beings, their similarities blurring the boundaries of difference. Through them, humanity becomes a singular shared experience of energy.

In Song dynasty ooo, the artist constructs a narrative that is deeply personal yet broadly political. It takes the form of this shared costume that serves as both a familial archive and a speculative vision of identity. The costume resembles an amphibious, leafy creature, its oval, fabric-covered form scaled in greens, whites, and metallic colours and its texture echoing an old gingham tablecloth, inspired by the artist’s childhood dining table. Designed for five members of the Song family, Song dynasty ooo is a futuristic garment for a family as a reclamation of biographical narrative, where family, memory, and imagination converge.

The Material Worlds exhibition is open to visit until 31st August 2025 at the Djanogly Gallery, Lakeside Arts. Find more details here.