The Skinny Showcase: Rae-Yen Song

Born in Edinburgh in 1993, Rae-Yen Song lives and works in Glasgow. Song’s work explores the position of Other within our tangled reality, and speaks broadly and politically about foreignness, identity, survival and what it means to belong – or not. It draws first and foremost on personal and familial experiences, then uses fantasy and fabulation to fill in the gaps – inflating and embellishing these narrative source materials, elevating them to the level of parable, visualising them, and finally plotting them as points and histories in a slowly-developing alternate dimension, saturated with affect, absurdity and incongruity.

The work finds form via drawing, sculpture, costume, props, video, animation, family collaboration, online content and performative actions in public. Increasingly, any or all of these elements coalesce as installations which form coherent, singular environments, and we, as viewers, are granted occasional glimpses of Song’s alternate dimension, via the medium of exhibitions and other artworks, that collectively come to form an archive of the Song family’s past, present and future. 

Song’s work can be seen in Fabric of Society, a group exhibition alongside Rabiya Choudhry, Jasleen Kaur and Raisa Kabir as part of Glasgow International’s Across the City programme (The Deep End, G41 2PZ).

It can also be seen in a nascent but growing online repository, www.songdynasty.life, and at www.rae-yen-song.com

Instagram: @raeyensong