Breathing Memorials: Rae-Yen Song 宋瑞渊’s •TUA• 大眼 •MAK•
On a dark and rainy Friday evening in Glasgow, I arrived at Tramway to see Rae-Yen Song 宋瑞渊’s latest exhibition, •TUA• 大眼 •MAK•. After a draining day of making coffees and smiling at customers, I felt depleted, but the show carried a vitality that brought me back to life. From the outset, it was clear that this was not simply an exhibition, but a living memorial—one that resisted permanence and embraced adaptation and collective survival.
Crossing into the gallery felt less like entering a space and more like stepping across a threshold. At its centre rose a sculpture that seemed to breathe: an anthropomorphic organism whose presence saturated the room. Tentacular extensions shimmered and quivered, as though the gallery had become the interior of a creature remembering, mourning, and evolving. This refusal of stasis—this insistence on flux—was already a political gesture, unsettling the monumental logic of institutions that fix memory in stone.
The sonic environment was not accompaniment but respiration: a low, resonant breath punctuated by tones that seemed to emanate from deep within the sculpture’s mantle. The sound carried the weight of ritual, unfolding like a memorial rite. Yet it was not mournful in a conventional sense. Instead, it acknowledged death as passage, decomposition as transformation. The creature seemed to grieve its ancestor while carrying forward new life, embodying Daoist cycles of change and diasporic futurism. In this moment, mourning became not an end but a generative rhythm of survival.
This sense of ceremony was heightened by the installation’s multisensory reach. Light shifted across surfaces like bioluminescent apparitions, and corporeal walkways invited the body to move in a different way. Each element functioned as an organ or sensory extension of the creature, attuned to ancestral memory and diasporic myth. Visitors were not passive spectators but participants in this ecology, folded into its rhythms. My own exhaustion dissolved into something more collective—an embodied reminder that survival is a shared experience.
The funerary tone of the opening performance gradually gave way to release. The space seemed to exhale, offering a sense of change and evolution. This rhythm of decay and renewal was not only sculptural but seasonal. Late autumn into winter is a time of shedding and transformation in the natural world, and the exhibition mirrored this collective rhythm—staging death not as an end but as a necessary passage into renewal. The creature’s breath became seasonal, its mourning aligned with the cycles of the earth, reframing fatigue as part of a larger ecology of change.
What makes •TUA• 大眼 •MAK• compelling is its refusal to remain static. It is not a monument but a process, a body in flux. The sculpture embodies survival and adaptation, drawing on diasporic futurism—the imagining of futures shaped by migration, myth, and resilience—and more-than-human politics, which challenge anthropocentric hierarchies by situating memory within ecological systems. In this way, the work resonates beyond its immediate aesthetic impact: it offers a radical ecology of care, where ancestral memory and microscopic lifeforms co-exist, where mourning becomes a collective act of transformation.
Leaving the space felt like emerging from within a body that had just exhaled. The traces of sound, light, and memory lingered, carried forward in my own breath. The exhibition is less an object to be reviewed than a ritual to be lived through—a passage from mourning into possibility. Song’s creature teaches us that mourning is not an end, but a collective rehearsal for survival. In doing so, •TUA• 大眼 •MAK• contributes to contemporary conversations about how art can resist monumentality, embrace flux, and imagine futures.
