Ancestral Ecologies: Rae-Yen Song 宋瑞渊 at CCA

Entering the first, dimly lit space in the CCA, the curious visitor is seemingly submerged into the depths of the ocean. Aquatic forms, cast in an array of materials, lie on the floor and suspended in mid-air. In the background, Anne Duk Hee Jordan’s film Ziggy and the Starfish features delectably colourful and kaleidoscopic coral reefs and sea creatures, accompanied by a lackadaisical soundtrack. The stillness of the sculptural works, in contrast with Jordan’s hypnotic film plays with our perception of time. This submerged space draws our attention away from ‘linear’, Western perceptions of time and perhaps towards an oceanic time, a subliminal and subconscious time. This is something that CCA’s curator Sabrina Henry hints at in the exhibition text, with an excerpt from K.K. Bunseki Fu-Kiau’s essay in the anthology Time in the Black Experience by Joseph K. Adjaye. 

Marking a change in direction from previous solo exhibition projects for Rae-Yen Song, life-bestowing cadaverous soooooooooooooooooooot invests in a set of artists and thinkers, who are brought together in a cacophonous and colourful research exhibition and extensive live programme. The process of putting together the exhibition all began with a drawing, which sits in the first space as you enter the exhibition. Titled (T_T), Rae-Yen Song describes it as "a map~blueprint~dream", or alternatively "an open-ended thinking-drawing". The artist explains how the drawing created an outline for putting together the exhibition: "It was a way for me to approach and begin sharing my entangled thoughts with thinkers across many different disciplines. Perhaps nervous that I didn’t have an academic tongue or brain, I used (T_T) as a way to explore my own language – one that I could share with others in order for them to navigate and pick at ideas with me in more visual, sensual, imaginative ways."

The exhibition brings together over 20 artists and thinkers and is accompanied by an extensive and ambitious live programme: "I’m interested in an array of thoughts~particles becoming entangled to create an ecosystem of ideas – based on feminist and decolonial thinking, and ideas of ecological power and more-than-human politics. This ecosystem is one which I imagine growing beyond my limited conceptions of time and space, and in which I like to imagine alternative, hopeful modes of existence." 

Rae-Yen Song 宋瑞渊, life-bestowing cadaverous soooooooooooooooooooot. Photo: Alan Dimmick.

I ask the artist about the decision to develop such a dynamic research exhibition and to invite this plethora of artists to participate: "Coming into this project a year and a half ago, I felt I was at a shifting point in my practice, a porous space full of questions and desires to dig deeper into personal fragmented ancestral memories that have ultimately affected my existence, and make me curious about other ways of living," the artist explains. "I’m interested in ways of living that jettison colonial, patriarchal logics and power structures, and instead find resistance in more-than-human politics and multispecies interdependency, spiritual imaginations, and speculative worlding. In order to explore this porous space, I felt the urge to connect and learn from others – to nourish these lively thoughts and begin a dialogue that would further fabulate them in unexpected and experimental ways."  

The exhibition could be seen almost as a constellation of experiences, reflections and thoughts, an ecosystem that creates new ecologies, which is how Rae-Yen Song understood the development of the exhibition and live programme. One installation in particular embodies this interest: "Ecology and growth are important aspects of the new installation that I have created in the space, ○ squigoda song cycle ● water~land~air ○, which I see as an experiment in multispecies collaboration. It incorporates a pool of tea fungus which is connected to contact mics, a hydrophone and other sensors. Sonic inputs – such as those caused by the movements of viewers – pass through it; and as it slowly ferments, the tea fungus itself generates changing signals and audio inputs. These inputs all feed into three ever-changing live soundscapes that flow through the three exhibition realms: water, land, and air. This becomes a collaboration not only with human sound artist Tommy Perman, but with the tea fungus itself." 

Reflecting on the exhibition, Rae-Yen Song says: "The exhibition raises many questions for me: how do I want to affect my environment? How do I want to be part of it/inhabit it? How do I collaborate with others (human and beyond human) to exist and grow together, harmoniously?... All of this matter has settled as a testing-ground; a new culture of thought for me to learn from, and to inspire further thinking towards the following cycle, a solo exhibition at Tramway in 2025." 

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 Rae-Yen Song 宋瑞渊: life-bestowing cadaverous soooooooooooooooooooot, CCA, Glasgow, until 18 May