Stunning Rain Room installation at Shanghai’s Yuz Museum brings audience and environment closer together
Random International’s latest creation is the experimental studio’s biggest yet
Is immersive art just a gimmick? Florian Ortkrass and Hannes Koch, the co-founders and creative directors of the art collective Random International, don’t think so. In the collective’s water-based Rain Room at Shanghai’s Yuz Museum, visitors are invited to take a leap of faith and walk through what looks like a downpour – without getting soaked.
“It is not just a playful experience,” explains Koch as he watches a handful of young Chinese giggling nervously as they make a tentative move towards the “rain”. “There are serious questions behind it referencing environmental pressures, climate change and technology.”
Ortkrass adds his take: “Immersion in an environment has been an interest of the studio for some time. With Rain Room we wanted to engage with the environment, to become part of the piece. The science and technology are just tools to explore how immersion affects the senses.”
The indoor installation features a 150 square metre field dropping 1,800 litres of water (recycled from the museum’s mains) per minute in what looks just like a downpour. The Rain Room has an intricate bank of 3D cameras and motion sensors that constantly track the audience’s movements and stop the water directly overhead when they sense a body in the space. Rain continues in front of and behind the person, creating an experience that is at once playful, unnerving and surreal.
The first Rain Room debuted at London’s Barbican Centre in 2012 before it was recreated in a temporary tent erected next door to New York’s Museum of Modern Art two years later.
In Shanghai, the cavernous space of the Yuz Museum offered an unmissable chance for the artists to install an even bigger version – 50 per cent larger than previous ones – within a matte black tent that blocks out all light except that coming from an enormous spotlight at one end of the room. The effect as it shines through the light transforms visitors in the rain into mesmerisingly ghostly silhouettes.