Why do people always want to know more stories? What can be considered a good story in this post-linear narrative age with or without the help of new tools? Sometimes I listen to others’ life stories to experiment others’ experience. Did I live their lives while listening? Was that an effective story-telling?

I am always into story-telling, and this interest remains a habit and a motivation for me to figure good ways to tell stories. However, I figured that good stories often lie in personal memory. The closer to one’s memory, the more powerful the story would be. Also, if there was more shared sensual experience, the story readers would feel closer to one’s memory. This happens in literature a lot, and we never lack of examples of this. Marcel Proust , Virginia Woolf had all created successful examples which will be explained more in the coming project statement chapter of this document. After realizing this connection, my belief in story-telling has shifted to rebuilding memory through sensual experience.

According to my experience as a story listener, I was often led to another different space from the present one while listening to a good memory story. Often, what happened in the story was far more influential to my mind. It formed a second ambient on top of the old space at the same time. In other words, the mental space made of others’ memory led me somewhere else but the old environment. To sum up, my idea of listening to stories can be explained as a mental, physical and sensual journey. The process can be illustrated by using this formula :
(From narrator)
Remember his/her story
+ Tell his/her memory by using sensual information
= A second space being generated while narrating.
This is my foundation of experimenting with spatial and sensual experimentation in narratives.

This work will be an installation intended to simulate a subtropical rainy afternoon. It will consist of a patio-size umbrella decorated with several smells inside of the umbrella. Those smells are smells that I have in my memory about subtropical rainy afternoons in Taiwan. People will be able to smell freely when walking under the umbrella and will experience my memory, which is my narrative of a rainy day :
(This will be what users will feel when under the personal space.)
“It’s raining.”
I was instantly being separated from the outside world under an umbrella under the pouring rain. I could do nothing but waiting. It became a world of my own; I am on my own.

The rain was too loud to be heard; I, myself, was good enough to be listened to.
It would be difficult to see through the rain, but it’s easier to see through my mind.

I hear something
touch something
smell something,

I feel them indeed.
Them in me, me and my memory.
In that way I feel more isolated, focusing, and imaginative.

The reason that I use an umbrella to show a rainy day scene was to isolate each visitor’s experience. My intension is to leave more space to them during the whole visit under the personal setting.

(My story behind will be part of my memory in my childhood with my grandmother.)
There was always nobody but grandma home when I got off from elementary school. I liked to listen to her cooking : there were lots of different sounds about washing cookers, fried pork with garlic, and cut celery into big chunks. She liked to add sauce, and the combination made me thought of her instantly. When I was home, there were two bowls of rice noodles, and we would exchange what we had in our bowls in the middle of our meal : she gave me the pork and I picked the celery to her. Grandma wasn’t that healthy after I grew more, so we would go buy lunch boxes instead she cooking for me. She always added a big chicken thigh on the top of the box. We carried the big box with strong chicken thigh all the way back home hand in hand. The greasy smell full of vinegar, ginger, soy bean sauce, and the old smell of an kitchen was my definition of lunch air.
When it’s around one, it started to pour. We always sat in the living room together eating the sorbet she made and waiting for the rain to stop. I would play her hand with lots of wrinkles, and the bracelet she wear. She always looked at somewhere far, or took a nap while we couldn’t go anywhere else.
The rain usually stopped suddenly in Taiwan, and the whole environment would full loud sounds from birds and insects. Grandma and I usually went for a walk along the osmanthus bushes. She would collect and pick some in her handkerchief. “The handkerchief will smell good for a long while.” she said. That was my air when walking on a brick road with her after the summer rain. When we were home, she would burn the incense and prayed another safe day. I looked at the ashes from the incense falling on our wet front balcony. And, an evening soon came with the smoke, with the humidity in the streets.

People who are sensitive to air changes (humidity,temperature...),interested in narrations in different forms.

People enter the installation and touch rain simulated by wires, smell the scent objects that hid in the rain, and they will hear the sound from a subtropical rainy day.

This work will be an installation intended to simulate a subtropical rainy afternoon. It will consist of a patio-size umbrella decorated with several smells inside of the umbrella. Those smells are smells that I have in my memory about subtropical rainy afternoons in Taiwan. People will be able to smell freely when walking under the umbrella and will experience my memory, which is my narrative of a rainy day.

It\'s a big umbrella hung with transparent wires and scent objects to simulate rain and release scent. There\'s also speaker inside playing the rainy day ambient sound on a subtropical island.