Rain as Storyteller: Group Exhibition “What Rain Tells You” Explores the Quiet Transformations of Light, Sound, and Time

New York, NY – Rain rarely demands attention, yet it reshapes everything it touches—light, sound, and thought itself. The group exhibition, What Rain Tells You, brings together a group of artists whose works explore rain as a quiet storyteller—an element that reshapes light, sound, and perception without ever announcing itself. Curated by independent curator and researcher Mason Pan, the exhibition traces how rain’s presence moves between grief and renewal, solitude and connection, and how its transient nature mirrors the cycles of dissolution and regeneration that shape both art and life.

The show begins with a question: What does the rain tell us when we pause to listen? Its voice is one of change, measured not by clocks but by transformation—what dissolves, what returns, and what grows again in the damp hush after the storm. Through painting, illustration, and installation, the participating artists reflect on how rain erodes and rebuilds, capturing fleeting states of light, memory, and emotion.

The exhibition includes works by Chen Da Xi, Barry Ekko, Emma June Jones, Yang Qingru, and Yen Yen. Together, their practices articulate a shared sensitivity toward time, atmosphere, and impermanence.

Chen Da Xi extracts compositional structures from Western painting traditions and combines them with natural elements such as extreme weather, vegetation, and landscape to explore balance between order and chaos. His works search for equilibrium between stability and disruption, while opening up new conceptual possibilities. In his own words, he seeks to depict a thunderstorm remembered from childhood—dark clouds pressing over the city, ozone thick in the air, the storm both breaking and rebuilding daily order. For him, such moments expand perception beyond the human-made world, reconnecting existence to the scale of the planet and the cosmos.

Barry Ekko, an illustrator and designer from Vancouver, Canada, creates digital images that merge modern cityscapes with retro-futurist aesthetics. Currently serving as art designer at the Vancouver Opera, Ekko’s Raincouver series captures the luminous quality of Vancouver’s rain-soaked nights. His stylized depictions of Burnaby, Gastown, YVR Airport, and English Bay translate ordinary rainy scenes into cinematic compositions, marked by geometric precision, vivid color contrasts, and soft gradients of light. The works portray a city where reflection, architecture, and atmosphere converge into dreamlike stillness.

Emma June Jones, a painter from Chicago now based in New York, contributes Past the Horizon (2025), an oil-on-canvas work that fuses dreamlike figuration with psychological intensity. A graduate of the Savannah College of Art and Design, Jones often situates bodies and landscapes in fluid, shifting environments. In this painting, eyes emerge from the water’s surface beneath streaks of rain, merging human perception with the natural world. The composition reflects her ongoing exploration of identity, vulnerability, and transformation through surreal imagery and saturated color.

Yang Qingru, an illustrator educated at the School of Visual Arts and the Maryland Institute College of Art, focuses on narrative scenes inspired by everyday life. Her work A Wet Day captures a small moment within rainfall—people continuing to move as the sky slows down. Yang’s practice uses bright palettes and risograph-like textures to convey emotional nuance and human connection. Recognized by the China Illustration Biennale, iJungle Illustration Awards, and Creative Quarterly, her illustrations portray rain as a gentle link between figures, transforming ordinary encounters into quiet acts of intimacy.

Yen Yen, a Taiwanese artist based in Brooklyn, New York, holds an M.F.A. in Painting and Drawing from Pratt Institute. Her practice merges Western compositional frameworks with sensory attention to natural phenomena, evoking both stability and transformation. Her exhibitions have appeared at Chinatown Soup in New York, One River Clark Gallery in New Jersey, and Kishka Gallery in Vermont, among others. Across her work, recurring motifs of water, air, and light suggest the continual motion between balance and dissolution.

Curator Mason Pan, currently studying at the University of Southern California, works between Beijing and New York. His research and curatorial projects focus on global artistic production, public art, and cross-cultural exchange. In What Rain Tells You, he extends these interests into a meditation on natural rhythm and artistic temporality. The exhibition views rain as both material and metaphor—an agent of erosion and renewal that mirrors the creative process itself.

Meaning, as the exhibition text notes, “accumulates in the gaps and overlaps, in what seeps from one piece into the next.” Across each work, rain becomes more than weather; it becomes a language of transition. By tracing rain’s quiet passage through the works, What Rain Tells You invites viewers to consider beauty not as permanence, but as transformation. It’s the momentary shimmer that remains after the storm has passed.

(Written by Jessie Epstein)