The Rain Season of Youth
Interactive Installation｜Education ｜Memory & Emotion ｜ 2025.8
Background
The Rain Season of Youth grows out of my own experience of growing up within China’s highly standardized education system. The work reflects on how personal expression and genuine emotion can be compressed or concealed within systems of examination, formulaic writing, and evaluation.
Although those years have passed and the “rainy season” of adolescence seems long over, a certain dampness still remains in my life. The project begins from this lingering feeling, translating pressure, silence, and unspoken emotion into a spatial experience that can be physically sensed by the audience.
Research
The research began with standardized writing within China’s examination system. Under strict time constraints and highly regulated forms of assessment, students often rely on fixed structures and expected modes of expression, leaving personal experience and emotional honesty in the background. The work therefore considers what remains outside standardized expression: emotions that are left unsaid, yet continue to persist.
In Chinese literary and cultural contexts, the “rainy season” is often used as a metaphor for adolescence. The image is also connected to China’s long agricultural history, in which the rainy season carries a dual meaning: it brings nourishment, growth, and the possibility of harvest, while also bringing floods, uncertainty, and forces that cannot be fully controlled.
This duality closely reflects adolescence itself—a period in which growth and pressure coexist, and change unfolds without being entirely controllable. Some emotions emerge suddenly, while others linger like moisture. In this sense, the “rainy season of youth” holds both transformation and vitality, as well as sensitivity, anxiety, and uncertainty.
Design
In the installation, I translate these cultural references and personal memories into a symbolic material language.
Exam papers represent standardized education and systems of evaluation. The umbrella suggests both protection from the rain and a sense of enclosure or restriction. Moss, which grows slowly in damp and shaded conditions, becomes a metaphor for emotions and memories that do not disappear, but accumulate quietly over time.
Mist turns the “rainy season” from a cultural metaphor into a physical atmosphere. As visitors approach the work, their presence triggers the mist, gradually obscuring the suspended exam papers, projected imagery, and surrounding space. The installation moves continuously between concealment and revelation.
Rather than describing a single emotion associated with adolescence, the work uses material, mist, image, and the audience’s body to make otherwise difficult-to-articulate feelings into something that can be entered, sensed, and experienced.
