☰pa●○pa☴ Exhibition Preview

You’re invited join a preview evening of our new exhibition,☰pa●○pa☴ by Rae-Yen Song

☰pa●○pa☴ is Rae-Yen Song’s first solo presentation of work in the south of England, and brings together existing and new artworks incorporating drawing, sculpture, costume, props, video, family collaboration and performance.

Encompassing the themes of fantasy and fabulation, this multidimensional exhibition invites visitors to explore Song’s world, and imagines a new character: a voyager from the multiverse that continues to grow through Song’s creative practice. The character is an incarnation of Song’s father, who has been instrumental in its formation. It draws on the visual language of role-play video gaming, and is imagined as a shape-shifting figure inspired by Taoist notions of continuous change. The character functions as part avatar, part deity. 

The exhibition features with a mesmerising new moving image work developed specifically for this landmark show, created in collaboration with Song’s father and the University of Portsmouth’s Centre for Creative and Immersive Extended Realities (CCIXR). These works are accompanied by a series of new drawings, influenced by ancient Buddhist manuscripts, illustrations from Dante’s Divine Comedy and Yokai Manga. 

From 5:30pm we invite artists for an extra half an hour to take advantage of an opportunity for networking. Whether you live locally or further afield pop in to meet other artists and make new connections or catch up with peers already known to you. Port Coffee will be selling alcohol and soft drinks throughout the evening.

Booking

Tickets for this event are free and can be booked on art tickets here

About the artist

Rae-Yen Song (b. 1993, Scotland, based in Glasgow) works expansively across mediums, including drawing, sculpture, installation, costume, video, sound, performance, and family collaboration. Song’s work explores self-mythologising as a survival tactic: using fantasy and fabulation to establish a richly visual world-building practice informed by autobiography, ancestral journeys, Taoist philosophy, family ritual, multi-species interdependency, and science fiction. For Song, world-building becomes a tool for imaginative self-definition, with familial logics becoming the foundations of an alternative reality untethered from linear conceptions of space and time. It allows Song to resist colonial tropes and conventions, crafting multidimensional personal records and offerings for the future. These narratives yield a mix of humour, empathy and absurdity, whilst speaking broadly and politically about foreignness, identity, survival and what it means to belong ― or not.

Recent exhibitions and projects include: Body Poetics, GIANT, Bournemouth (2023); Let the Song Hold Us, FACT Liverpool (2022); Meet me at the threshold, Talbot Rice Gallery, University of Edinburgh (2022); Aggregate 2022, Freelands Foundation, London (2022); WORMB, Quench Gallery, Margate (2022); ▷▥◉▻ at Dundee Contemporary Arts (2021); wūûūwūûū, a LUX Scotland moving image commission for BBC Scotland (2021); Fabric of Society, Glasgow International (2021); ✵may-may songuu✵, esea contemporary, Manchester (2020); songdynasty.life, a nascent online archive with videos previously commissioned by Edinburgh Art Festival and Hunterian Art Gallery (2020 – ongoing).

☰pa●○pa☴ is free to visit. Aspex Portsmouth is open Wednesday – Sunday, 11am-4pm. 

This exhibition is supported by the Henry Moore Foundation.