Rae-Yen Song

About

This new body of work gives viewers a glimpse of an alternate dimension, shaped according to the ancestral logics and imagined futures of Song’s family, which serves simultaneously as spectacle, memorial and refuge. Visitors will be granted access to a multi-sensory environment, a speculatively sacred space from a stubbornly uncertain point in time and space, which floats somewhere between history, memory and imagination.

Song’s work explores self-mythologising as a survival tactic: using fantasy to create a personal cultural language informed by autobiography, family stories, relationships and memories. Adopting this language as a tool for self-definition and imaginative resistance, the artist creates multidimensional, non-linear bodies of work that speak broadly and politically about race, gender, culture, identity and what it means to belong - or not.

Through this practice, Song uses lived experience as a starting point to reconstruct a sense of self uncoupled from cultural stereotypes and stigma based on gender and race. Using myth and fantasy, and actively rejecting Western narrative structures in favour of experimental forms, the work interrogates issues of diaspora and hybridity, in spaces created by the artist where cultural rules and social norms have been overturned.

The cornerstones of familial connectedness, from storytelling to sibling dynamics to ancestral traces, sit at the heart of this project. Song’s works are always a form of personal activism where alternative realities are proposed and ownership over biographical narrative is reclaimed.