THE SKINNY
Art
A New and Ancient Language Glasgow-based artist Rae-Yen Song’s first solo exhibition is now on at Dundee Contemporary Arts. Here, the artist shares some insights into making this new body of work, which is rich with symbolism and wellcrafted surprising details Interview: Adam Benmakhlouf
R
ae-Yen Song’s (R-YS) work is a whole universe, so it’s only appropriate that it’s constantly expanding across a prolific output of public performance, installation, costume, video, family collaboration and drawing. What emerges is a multimedia practice that seems to have no bounds. For instance, in 2018 when R-YS appeared in The Skinny to speak about being in that year’s Edinburgh Art Festival, the exhibition included a gold-framed A0 lenticular image (the kind of ridged photograph that when tilted, gives the impression of a moving image) of R-YS’s family wearing bespoke costumes, including large pink-skinned heads with wide eyes and round “ooh-ing” mouths, with two of them in a handmade costume of a roaring beast, all standing in rolling hills in a green spot in Edinburgh. This was one point in a timeline that now spans many years of R-YS dedicatedly building an ambitious and idiosyncratic network of characters,
January 2022 — Feature
Photo: Ruth Clark Rae-Yen Song ▷▥◉▻ 2021. Installation view at Dundee Contemporary Arts
settings and motifs, including stylised clouds, many-legged microbes, and a multi-headed figure with a huge open mouth on the torso where a belly would usually be. While the beasts are uncanny, and with impossible-seeming anatomies, there’s nevertheless a coherence to the world that is inviting and intriguing. Throughout different events and exhibitions, these inventions by R-YS's come convincingly together in their suggestion of form and believable dimension, suggesting a space that seems to have its own atmospheric conditions. This is in no small part because all of its elements are made entirely by R-YS’s own hand. There’s the strong sense of R-YS’s singular vision that unifies the many projects, exhibitions and events that R-YS's has formed so far. Nevertheless, the settings and bodies within this world are subject to ongoing change. In DCA right now, you’ll find – for example – a huge-scale, long-bodied tent of a creature, tongue protruding. From a certain angle, its many legs read as ribs, while from another perspective it seems like the hull of a boat. It looks like it could be microscopic bacteria or a deep-sea creature and it appears in several elements of the installation. In this way, motifs recur within and across R-YS’s works and exhibitions. “The space [in DCA] has its own logic or language... You don’t have to understand it, but you see it, you see that there’s a meaning there, a relationship, a world and a different way of existing.” R-YS's also speculates about the physical ways an exhibition visitor might try to find their place within these works on a physical level. More specifically, there’s a shifting in perception across different impressions of “micro- and macro-scale, growing and shrinking. Things are shifting and permanence is uncertain; you are uncertain about the true scale of things, the scale of you within it all.” Highly suggestive in their textures, bright colours and forms, R-YS’s works skilfully elude stable identities. “I find it very pleasurable making something that can be everything; nothing; what it wants/needs to be; it can be so big that it disappears or so small – it’s everywhere. In this way, I see myself in it all. I am a shoe. But also a microbeast, a boat to take you to a new life, a rock, an orifice, an eyeball, a pot, liquid, my grandfather, my mother, a smell for your belly, the trapped air you need to fart out.” — 28 —
Entering into the large-scale installation means being gently submerged in the carefully interrelated details and structures set up by R-YS's, which create layers of symbolism that are the rewards of slow looking. The multiple significances of each of the deftly-made elements proliferate, making for surprises as new details seem to appear, and the work encourages, in a literal as well as a broader sense that “we can keep revealing layers, become something else ... – it is slippy and totally free.” The above mention by R-YS's of family members (“my grandfather, my mother”) is not made lightly. R-YS’s practice makes extensive references to fragments of family stories and histories, which appear and are transformed in R-YS’s works. The oral style that often characterises the transmission of knowledge among families is suggested in the title of the show itself, which is ▷▥◉▻. “There are no Roman characters used to spell the title, it’s only read through the symbols. I like the idea of [▷▥◉▻] being uttered orally, and that being understood through mouth and tongue and passed between people.” There are further layers of delicate significance in the title, ▷▥◉▻ . “These four symbols… pictorially symbolise the body of the space, the architecture, but those symbols are pronounced as 'seoh', which is echoing my mother’s generation name in Hokkien dialect, and loosely translates as ‘precious’. All of this is an indication that this is precious space, this is family space, treasure that is uncovered but also still has a sense of mystery and ambiguity to it.” The title is another instance of the hints that glitter throughout the exhibition, allusions to its own internal logic and the structures and symbolisms that R-YS's builds piece-bypiece. Studied closer, the title reveals itself as a succinct blueprint of the entire installation, abstracting the largest elements into a small typographic version, as if seen from above. At the suggestion that R-YS's is bringing materials and works alive, R-YS's replies, “I think they’re most alive when I’m making them. Purely there’s that energy that you’re just infusing into it, there’s energies being expelled and created fundamentally, heat is being created in sanding, in fettling, in using your hands around a material. You’re warming it up, you’re warming up a body, you
