Preview 14 November 6pm to 9pm
Performance at 6.30pm
•~TUA~• 大眼 •~MAK~• is an ambitious multimedia installation by artist Rae-Yen Song 宋瑞渊 that evokes a sub-aquatic world shaped according to the ancestral logics of the Song family, which serves simultaneously as spectacle, memorial and refuge. The exhibition of •~TUA~• 大眼 •~MAK~• at Tramway in Glasgow immerses visitors in a phantasmagoric watery abyss populated by ancestral characters, and includes an array of newly-commissioned artworks in ceramic, glass, costume, sound, light and an installation of animations produced by Film and Video Umbrella and Tramway. These artworks are entangled within the body of an immense microbeast, an ethereal creature stretching across the gallery space, drawn from the artist’s heritage and family mythology.
Song sees this creature as an embodiment of tua mak 大眼 ( “big eyes” in the Teochew dialect) - a relative, known only through familial memories and myths, who drowned at sea aged thirteen, in 1950s Singapore. The artist imagines a body being eaten and excreted by innumerable others in this watery grave; tua mak becomes a dispersed lifeform, cycling eternally in a process of continuous change and perpetual migration. Song also draws on the origin tale of Pangu, the creation figure in Chinese mythology and Daoism whose decomposing body became earthly features such as mountains, water, air, plants and creatures.
Shifting light, and an ever-evolving soundscape developed in collaboration with sound artist Flora Yin Wong, create an immersive, theatrical environment. The layered, polyphonic score merges the artists’ field recordings with the amplified echoes of pond-life. Sound and light are controlled by the microscopic lifeforms at the core of the installation, living in the Song family pond. The pond itself has been transported from Edinburgh, and occupies a tank within a sculptural shrine at the centre of the exhibition. It nestles within the microbeast’s body, serving as a heart, or perhaps a brain - the living nucleus of the exhibition.
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Image: Rae-Yen Song 宋瑞渊, •~TUA~• 大眼 •~MAK~• (abyss), 2025. Ink and papa’s pen on papa’s paper, 280 x 385mm.
