Rae-Yen Song
Rae-Yen Song is a visual artist that works expansively across mediums, including drawing, sculpture, installation, costume, video, sound, performance, and family collaboration. By using fantasy and storytelling, this installation explores Dual Identity from a non-human perspective.
◉yap◉, 2021
Silk, cotton, faux fur, polyester, imitation rice beads, papier-mâché
Rae-Yen Song: I was born in Scotland and that is kind of the impetus of how I have been exploring identity. Being Scottish, and then my parents are from Singapore, and having Chinese heritage, there’s always been this, I guess, this push and pull, and feelings of belonging, or not belonging and whether that be positive or negative. I think I’m quite interested in the idea of not belonging as a positive, and as something that, I guess, taps into survival techniques or strategies. And looking at other kind of beings, other non-human species and how they can belong to a place or how they can survive and thrive in different, often hostile environments, and echoing that into what I do and what I research within my practice, and how I want to explore it.
Biography
Rae-Yen Song is a visual artist that works expansively across mediums, including drawing, sculpture, installation, costume, video, sound, performance, and family collaboration. Song’s work explores self-mythologising as a survival tactic: using fabulation to establish a richly visual world-building practice informed by autobiography, ancestral journeys, Taoist philosophy, family ritual, multi-species interdependency, and science fiction. For Song, world-building becomes a tool for imaginative self-definition, with familial logics becoming the foundations of an alternative reality untethered from linear conceptions of space and time. It allows Song to resist colonial tropes and conventions, crafting multidimensional personal records and offerings towards radically different futures. These narratives yield a mix of humour, empathy and absurdity, whilst speaking broadly and politically about foreignness, identity, survival and what it means to belong ― or not.
Recent exhibitions and projects include: ☰pa●○pa☴, Aspex, Portsmouth (2023); Let the Song Hold Us, FACT Liverpool (2022); Meet me at the threshold, Talbot Rice Gallery, University of Edinburgh (2022); Aggregate 2022, Freelands Foundation, London (2022); WORMB, Quench Gallery, Margate (2022); ▷▥◉▻, Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee (2021). Other selected projects include: wūûūwūûū, a LUX Scotland moving image commission for BBC Scotland (2021); Fabric of Society, Glasgow International (2021); songdynasty.life, a nascent online archive, with videos commissioned by Edinburgh Art Festival and Hunterian Art Gallery (2020 – ongoing); ✵may-may songuu✵, a solo exhibition at Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art, Manchester (2020).