'wūûūwūûū' by Rae-Yen Song featured in Animated Shorts: BBC Introducing Arts

Part of Now & Next

Rae-Yen Song, 'wūûūwūûū' video still, 2021. Courtesy of the artist.

wūûūwūûū by Rae-Yen Song, commissioned as part of Now & Next in 2020, screened on BBC Four on 12 December 2021 as part of Animated Shorts: BBC Introducing Arts and is now available to watch on BBC iPlayer. wūûūwūûū is a 2D animation, in which digital drawing is combined with pen and fibre-tipped markers on paper, to create a vivid, self-contained realm of interconnected beings and spaces.

wūûūwūûū offers a mutating, ever-shifting vision of worlds within worlds within worlds. It introduces a cast of obscure, interconnected creatures, who variously consume, inhabit and host each other, in an ongoing, cyclical symbiosis of survival. Bodies do what bodies do: eat and excrete; sing and dance; come and go. Moments of levity and menace combine with elemental forces and unstoppable motions to form a distinctive, disorientating, but somehow harmonious process.

The characters and topographies of wūûūwūûū form a bewildering but balanced ecosystem: they end where they begin. They appear alien and transient, but seem to bear an oblique wisdom, having something to teach us about ego and impermanence, in a world in which our interdependence – with entities which seem radically different – is unavoidable.

About the artist

Rae-Yen Song is an artist based in Glasgow. Working across sculpture, drawing, installation, video, sound, costume, family collaboration and performative actions in public, Song uses a striking visual language to explore an alternative dimension. Shaped according to the observed and imagined logics of Song’s own family, this dimension serves simultaneously as spectacle, memorial and refuge.

Part of Now & Next

Now & Next was a talent development scheme in partnership with Creative Scotland and BBC Scotland that ran from 2019 to 2022.

Learn more