From October 24 to November 22, 2026, VILLA tbh presents it’s raining outside, it’s raining inside, the concluding exhibition of Duyi Han’s artist residency with tbh. Following several weeks of living and working on the house’s third floor, Han has assembled a garden of textiles, embroidery, sound, and sculptural forms, with an atmosphere borrowed in part from the listening room. The light and sound of rainy days, songs encountered by chance, fragments of cinema, and imagined forms have found their way into a collection of objects, each with a character of its own.
During the residency, Han became attentive to the particular atmosphere of the house and its surroundings. The cultural history of this Shanghai neighborhood, the relationship between gardens and everyday life, and the architectural character of the house gradually found their way into his work. As new pieces appeared throughout the rooms, the house acquired a faintly peculiar life. Some seem perfectly at home, while others appear unexpected, extravagantly overgrown, or a little difficult to explain.
At the center of the room, a carpet patterned with ripples holds an assortment of textile sculptures. Slender tubular structures intersect, pleats unfold and droop, and translucent shells partially reveal the forms within. A suspended light hovers overhead. Moving around the carpet, visitors encounter smaller scenes tucked into cabinets, the kitchen sink, and the bathroom. A transparent garment is surrounded by circulating air and tiny fragments. Water droplets appear to have stopped evaporating. Pink fabric glows softly against dark gray stone. As the eye wanders from one scene to another, objects shift between foreground and background, revealing new relationships from different viewpoints.
The sounds, light, and subtle sensory shifts of rainy weather have been important to the making of this exhibition. The weightlessness and transparency of organza echo the damp, hazy atmosphere of a rainy day and its occasional moments of sudden brightness. There is also an element of intuition in Han’s process, something like arranging a small cluster of plants and gradually deciding how each stem should lean. Certain forms are carefully considered, while others emerge through discoveries made in the course of working with the material.
Often we do not know what we are feeling and unexpectedly find it in a song, a breeze, a cloud. It is through a particular chord, aroma, or atmospheric condition that passions are stirred and we suddenly recognize our own emotions. Han imagines the exhibition as a Listening Garden, drawing on the atmosphere of a listening room. Music plays continuously throughout the house, while lyrics from different musicians and films enter the works as titles, embroidery, or, occasionally, a cry that has almost lost its meaning. Intimacy, exhaustion, defiance, longing, and uncertainty arrive in these borrowed voices, lending the strange forms a sense of stories unfolding around them. Visitors drift through the rooms to the music, pausing before objects and the words scattered among them. These fleeting scenes can resemble moments from a music video, where an image gathers associations through the presence of sound.
Poetry, calligraphy, objects, and domestic traditions from China’s Song and Ming dynasties, alongside the spatial sensibility of twentieth-century Milanese residences, provide historical points of reference. The place of writing within objects and everyday life in historical China, and the careful attention to proportion, material, and empty space in Milanese interiors, inform Han’s decisions throughout the exhibition. Traces of these histories can be found in the placement of text, the contours of objects, and the arrangement of the rooms, where they mingle with contemporary pop music, synthetic textiles, and slightly eccentric forms.
it’s raining outside, it’s raining inside brings a curious kind of vitality to VILLA tbh. Things appear to be growing, still finding their shape, carrying the dampness and haze of rainy weather and a light, elusive emotional charge. The garden becomes a place for chance, imagination, and passing feelings, introducing a little unpredictability into the familiar rhythms of domestic life.
