by Adela Lovric // Jan. 20, 2026
For their most ambitious exhibition to date, Rae-Yen Song 宋瑞渊 transforms Tramway’s vast exhibition hall into a submerged cosmology shaped by ancestral mythologies, Daoism, collective ritual and multispecies kinship. In this phantasmagoric aqueous environment—the most recent project in Song’s ongoing world-building practice—life is understood as cyclical, relational and continuously in flux. Titled ‘•~TUA~• 大眼 •~MAK~•’, the exhibition comprises newly commissioned works in sculpture, textiles, printmaking, sound, light and moving image, all entangled within a glowing chimeric creature whose tentacles extend from a central sanctum to the edges of the space. At the end of each extremity is a textile sculptural mask embodying an ancestral figure from Song’s visual mythology, positioned to look upon a luminous animation contained within a mouth-blown glass sculpture.
Central to this world is the figure of tua mak (大眼; “big eyes” in the Teochew dialect), an ancestor known only through fragmented family stories, who drowned at sea in Singapore at the age of 13. Song imagines tua mak as a dispersed lifeform, whose watery decomposition gives rise to innumerable other beings. This logic is materially anchored by a living pond at the center of the “microbeast~pagoda,” whose microscopic life actively shapes the exhibition’s shifting light and an ever-evolving soundscape, created in collaboration with sound artist Flora Yin Wong.
Surrounding the main installation is a series of suspended sculptural costumes, intended for activation throughout the exhibition. The first in the series of performances took place during the opening as a procession featuring members of the Song family bearing a five-meter-long puppet. Song’s practice is grounded in making as a communal and ritual act, with family members as collaborators, objects as offerings and performances as shared gestures of care. In our interview, they reflect on the stories, materials and relationships that give rise to ‘•~TUA~• 大眼 •~MAK~•,’ articulating world-making as an urgent practice and a method of survival that rehearses alternative ways of being amid compounding crises.
Rae-Yen Song 宋瑞渊: ‘•~TUA~• 大眼 •~MAK~•,’ exhibition view at Tramway, Glasgow, 2025-26 // Photo by Keith Hunter, courtesy of Tramway
Adela Lovric: World-building has long been central to your practice, and ‘•~TUA~• 大眼 •~MAK~•’ is your most intricate weaving of an alternate reality yet. What are the key threads that bring this world into being?
Rae-Yen Song: I always begin with stories, and these stories are often oral. They’re nonlinear, they’re really slippy. They also have loads of gaps in them because things have been lost through movement, through different journeys, through silence, through violence. I think of fabulation as a way to fill in those gaps and to bring in my own imaginings, criticalities of who I am in the present and my reality, but forming that into a new story. I think about creating these stories as offerings, as environments to inhabit and also proposals for alternative cultures and futures and ways of being.
With ‘•~TUA~• 大眼 •~MAK~•’ and the world-making that I pursue, I work between the microscopic, the macro and the mythic all at once. There’s the living pond with its microbial world, its own world-making. There’s also the massive cosmological myth of the Daoist’s story of Pangu’s death that I am influenced by, whose body became mountains, rivers, forests and animals. I think of the multitudes and the many lives that can make a whole world.
World-building for me is porous and cyclical. It’s never one project; it’s a long-term exercise of my practice, they all feed into one another. There’s a kind of composting, reshaping, remolding, bringing new voices that echo one another or become glyphs and symbols and continuously are able to tell other stories and create other languages and meanings. It’s about getting closer to ecological and more-than-human wisdom and broadening what family can be. It’s thinking about Daoist logic that is very much a guide of softness, of flowing and a relational attunement to all other living things and natures.
Rae-Yen Song 宋瑞渊: ‘•~TUA~• 大眼 •~MAK~•,’ exhibition view at Tramway, Glasgow, 2025-26 // Photo by Keith Hunter, courtesy of Tramway
AL: The central part of your installation at Tramway is arguably the most magnetic: a sanctum where all the tentacular tunnels converge. During the opening, it became the most crowded spot. Could you talk about the meaning and “function” of this central feature, and how an aquarium housing living organisms came to be part of it?
RYS: I consider it the belly of this microbeast. I see it as the heart, the energy, the brains of ‘•~TUA~• 大眼 •~MAK~•.’ At the core of this space is a living pond. It’s my family pond, from Edinburgh, where I grew up. I’ve lived all my life with it and consider it a family member and ancestor. It was decanted and the liquid was transported to Tramway. It was the first thing in the space for install. I brought in a microbiologist to look at it with me and think about it as this ecosystem that I want to care for and think of as family. Because this isn’t just a symbolic idea—it’s an active collaborator. I deliberately wanted it to be at a certain height where we meet this body eye to eye. We gravitate towards it and we’re looking at the pond, but the pond is also looking at us, and different perspectives of the pond are also dotted on the wall, like big eyeballs. It’s just a small, simple shift of perspective so that this pond becomes an equal.
With the idea of this pond being the heart and the chi in relation to tua mak as well, I was thinking about water cycles, and about the ocean that consumed tua mak as a child in 1950s Singapore. How that liquid evaporates and becomes cloud, and those clouds rain down and, through many shifting cycles, that eventually fills this pond. Through space and time, this pond is a continuation of many bodies and transformations. It’s a teacher for the future that holds the wisdom that we so desperately need.
There are microscopic cameras that livestream its interior world that we can’t see with our own eyes. We built a program that has vision analysis, a system that allows the microorganisms’ movement to control the installations, light and sound. So, the pond is literally shaping the atmosphere around it, breathing, singing and controlling this space beyond me. People gather there because the energy, the life, is real. There’s this self-sustaining ecosystem, a world that is full of decomposition, death, feeding life again and again and again. We’re breathing the same air as the pond, and so we’re entangled with it.
Rae-Yen Song 宋瑞渊: ‘•~TUA~• 大眼 •~MAK~•,’ exhibition view at Tramway, Glasgow, 2025-26 // Photo by Keith Hunter, courtesy of Tramway
AL: Family is at the heart of your exhibition—both the ancestors it invokes and honors, and your parents and siblings who were involved in different aspects of the show. Could you walk us through the process of this collaborative work?
RYS: Family is everything. Not just with this project, but with many previous works, they’re always part of the process. With this project in particular, my parents came into my studio every week and helped make it. There’s an exchange of energy where they also learn skills: how to work with clay, glazes, textiles, paper, rice paste. They crafted the masks that we all wore at the opening performance. But also, in that exchange, my mama would bring the lunches and the dinners and sweet treats. They were really hands on, and their energy is circulating with mine. That making together is a ritual. The stories become communal and that’s when they are truly alive—when they’re shared, repeated and reshaped.
Crafting alongside my family means so much because we are telling these ancestral stories together with care and giving them new tongues and potentials and embodiments. My siblings alongside my mother and father, we did the opening performance, the parasitic worm blessing, together. All of that is a total joyful moment—blending the labor of making, but also play, devotion, mischief and family dynamics. The idea of family, for me, doesn’t just stop there. It goes beyond lineage. It’s my most honest way of getting closer to another—to consider them as family to care for.
Rae-Yen Song 宋瑞渊: ‘•~TUA~• 大眼 •~MAK~•,’ exhibition view at Tramway, Glasgow, 2025-26 // Photo by Keith Hunter, courtesy of Tramway
AL: Could you elaborate on the role of craft in your work? What do hand-made textile, ceramic and glass objects materialize and manifest in the alternate world of ‘•~TUA~• 大眼 •~MAK~•?’
RYS: I think of myself first and foremost as a maker. I love making things with my hands; that’s when this real flow of energy can happen. It’s the way of feeling and sensing; searching beyond the cerebral. It’s a care for detail. It’s a literal warming up of ideas until they take on a life of their own. I’m not really interested in art objects that are static. I’m more interested in making tools, instruments, vessels, shelters, costumes, as offerings that I can give to others later on. I want to make things that predate Western categories of art, but I want to make things related to life, which tell stories through the energy and being together. Things that you can give warmth to and in return they warm you.
In ‘•~TUA~• 大眼 •~MAK~•’, there are these costumes, the clouds that drift above, and then there’s Amma’s armor—amma being tua mak’s mother—that’s made out of textiles, ceramic and willow. There are ceramics in the pond that look like pond beasts, but then they become habitats for different organisms. Everything has many lives. It gives me great joy to think of something that can be anything it wants to be, and maybe that’s an echo of how I want to live.
With craft and making also comes a lot of collaboration. The way of making in itself hopefully mirrors this cosmology in my work of how I want to think in layers, as a collective world-making rather than one God. Going back to tua mak, this body cycling through life and death and life and death again, this body made out of many lives, I want to honor that we are chimeras made of many things, and so many things make up this body.
Rae-Yen Song 宋瑞渊: ‘•~TUA~• 大眼 •~MAK~•,’ exhibition view at Tramway, Glasgow, 2025-26 // Photo by Keith Hunter, courtesy of Tramway
AL: I’m curious about your relationship to world-building in more general terms—how do you understand its potential in this particular set of circumstances we’re living in today?
RYS: I think about this a lot, particularly in these past two years. What does it mean to be, what does it mean to make art? What does it mean to world-build during a genocide? That is so hard to answer. World-making for me is a survival tactic. It’s a resistance against these harrowing realities and the impounding horrors that we are currently living through—capitalistic extraction, genocide, fascism, ecological collapse. These oppressive powers want to impose a reality that is depleting and draining us, causing violence amongst us and numbing and rotting our very core. World-building refuses that flattening.
In these kinds of things, I’m guided by Daoist cosmology, multispecies kinship and diasporic knowledge and experiences. World-making is a craft in itself, and it’s cyclical and totally relational. It’s so sensory, you want to lick it. It means continuously thinking with others and recognizing that we are all entangled and we are nothing without each other. It asks us to compost what harms us and nourish what can help us grow. And it is deeply political. For me, it’s not escapism. The fantastical allows us to imagine otherwise, and it refuses an erasure. It’s this honing of energy, of hope, of alternatives and survivals towards other futures. It’s constantly fluid and shaping itself, and it’s shaping itself beyond me. What’s really important to me is that this environment and the things that I’ve made aren’t static objects, but energies that can be shared, embodied and transformed by many others.
Over the course of the duration of the exhibition, I want many energies and people and other beings to gather, to imagine, to share ideas, to all vibrate together. With all of this, world-making is like a portal that allows for all these ideas and actions and energies to not just be rhetoric, but to be a rehearsal and be something that can grow from what is essentially micro to hopefully macro, like forming a community.
Exhibition Info
Tramway
Rae-Yen Song 宋瑞渊: ‘•~TUA~• 大眼 •~MAK~•’
Exhibition: Nov. 15, 2025-Aug. 16, 2026
tramway.org
25 Albert Dr, Glasgow G41 2PE, UK, click here for map
