Glasgow
“Immersive” is an overused term in contemporary art, a quick-fix shorthand that is often just wishful thinking. Scottish artist Rae-Yen Song, however, has created an exhibition (on view through August 16, 2026) that, with its multitudinous elements of sculpture, sound, and animated film, deserves the description—as long as you’re happy to pause a good long while in its dimly lit, multisensory environment.
The interconnected works filling Tramway’s vast main gallery (a handout includes an annotated map) draw heavily on Song’s family heritage while also referencing Chinese mythology and the philosophical and religious ideas of Daoism. Two stories are imbedded within the structure of the show: the story of Pangu—in Daoism, the creator figure whose decomposing body formed the features of the earth—and that of family member who drowned at sea in 1950s Singapore at the age of 13, before Song’s mother was born. Known through “familial memories and myth,” this maternal relative becomes tua mak (or “big eyes”), a name that lends the exhibition its title: “•~TUA~• 大眼 •~MAK~•.”
At the center of the space, •~microbeast~• (tua mak’s skin)—a large, jellyfish-like, ribbed pagoda, hangs down from the roof girders to form the inner sanctum of Song’s visual mythology. Eight extending tentacles, which consist of edged sheer fabric, allow visitors to walk underneath/inside them, creating a series of pathways into the pagoda. Here, surrounded by fabric and inflated PVC, we find a circular space with red velvet banquette seating and a raised pond surrounded by five “offerings” that include ceramic statuettes and a pair of cat-like silk shoes. Made by the artist, these are “imagined as the sacred items” of tua mak’s mother.
Daoist thinking posits that everything in our world is connected by a unifying life force, and Song emphasizes this belief by describing many of the exhibition’s elements as aspects of tua mak’s dispersed being. The pond is qi (energy or heart); five hand-dyed fabric “clouds” hanging from the ceiling are breath; the tentacles’ ends are mountains and tua mak’s feet (although they resemble neither and actually feature detail-rich tapestries depicting the faces of “ancestral characters”).
The pond, as qi, plays a key role in Song’s representation of this connectedness. Decanted from her parents’ home in Edinburgh, its slightly murky water supports an ecosystem of tiny organisms. Although many of these are too small to be seen with the naked eye, we know they are there because of two microscopic pond cameras that film in real time; the footage is displayed in large circular projections on the walls. A multi-speaker soundscape, •~thunder~• (tua mak’s voice), consisting of Gamalan music from Indonesia, recordings from Song family events, and a range of audio samples, is triggered by the motion of the pond creatures. So, too, is the exhibition lighting. The volume crescendos and falls in a meditative and at times trancey fashion; blue, pink, and yellow lights flash and fade.
Song made many of the pieces in the show by hand, often working with family members and other collaborators. For the digital animation •~ghosts~• (song~xian), she teamed up with a microbiologist who generated footage of organisms from the pond. These images were re-created as eight glazed ceramic deities, then 3D scanned and animated. The resulting beings flicker and shimmy inside a series of mouth-blown glass heads placed on pedestals at either end of the gallery, just beyond the reach of the tentacles.
•~ghosts~• (song~xian) is perhaps the most compelling work in “•~TUA~• 大眼 •~MAK~•.” Its combination of Daoist philosophy, digital tech, and traditional craft skills evokes a kind of backward and forward time travel, a leap across the generations. For Song, it seems, the act of making is in itself an expression of her interconnectedness, her deep-time identity, an anchor point and link to previous generations and the world around her.
