Most rain-themed installations give you an image of rain — a projection, a soundscape, a photograph of wet glass. Duyi Han’s “it’s raining outside, it’s raining inside,” open October 24 through November 22 at VILLA tbh, a historic residence in Shanghai, gives you the house itself rebuilt around the feeling of it, room by room, material by material.
Han, a Shanghai-based designer and artist whose practice she describes as creating “neuroaesthetic prescriptions,” developed the piece over a multi-week residency inside the villa before installing it — which shows in how specifically each room answers a different sensory register of rain rather than repeating the same gesture throughout the house.
A custom carpet printed with concentric rain-ripple motifs anchors the main space, grounding a cluster of pleated, translucent organza sculptures that read as suspended droplets caught mid-fall. Elsewhere in the house: hand embroidery stitching fragments of song lyrics and film dialogue into fabric, a sheer tailored garment displayed in a timber vitrine, embroidered organza shoes and socks, and — in a small, pointed detail — 3D-printed resin water droplets positioned over the kitchen sink, as if the plumbing itself were still mid-storm. The bathroom gets backlit textiles and additional acoustic elements, continuing the installation into the one room in a house already organized around water.
The title’s inside/outside inversion is the whole idea stated plainly: rain is usually something a house keeps out. Han’s version imports it, distributed across materials that respond to light, touch, and in the embroidered fragments, language, rather than confined to one soundscape or one screen.
Han’s work sits in the Brooklyn Museum’s permanent collection (Ordinance of the Subconscious Treatment) and SFMOMA’s (an Oxytocin cabinet), and she was named to Apple’s Designers of Tomorrow initiative — context for why a solo show in a Shanghai villa is drawing the kind of attention it is, rather than passing as a local gallery booking.