Rae-Yen Song explores self-mythologising as a survival tactic: using fantasy and fabulation to establish a richly visual world-building practice informed by diasporic~ancestral mythology, Daoism, family ritual, ecology, more-than-human politics, and science fiction.
Song’s world-building practice visions alternative social spaces untethered from linear conceptions of space and time, and which disown colonial, patriarchal logics and power structures. Instead, the twin foundations of these alternative spaces are the logics of Rae-Yen’s own human family, and those of beyond-human communities – particularly in relation to collaborative notions of symbiosis and multi-species entanglement.
This world-building happens, fundamentally through drawing. Glimpses of this world then manifest themselves expansively through sculpture, installation, textile, video, sound and performance, as speculative and sensual environments. These spaces stand as multidimensional personal records that speak broadly and politically about foreignness, identity, survival and what it means to belong ― or not. Whilst enigmatic and ambiguous, they also act generatively as offerings, visions of alternative cultures, inviting audiences to imagine their own vital, entangled futures.