Windscape (风・景)
Yale School of Art Edgewood Gallery
New Haven
June 19 - June 20, 2025
On Saturday, evening passersby could hear the resonant ringing of the giant wind chime inside the Yale School of Art’s Edgewood Gallery.
Crafted from reclaimed metal pipes and suspended from the ceiling, the chime was the centerpiece of Windscape (风・景), a theatrical installation for International Festival of Arts & Ideas presented in partnership with the Yale-China Association.
The exhibit, which ran from June 19 to June 22, offered a poignant meditation on the ephemeral nature of memory, time, and nostalgia, with each element designed to engage the surrounding space, inviting both the natural world and visitors into its rhythm.
Along one wall, the creators had pinned up a giant scroll of white paper. During an interactive workshop on Thursday night, visitors were invited to reflect on their experience and connect with their own relationship with wind. Chinese characters — such as those for home, water, and moon — stretched across the surface, echoing the exhibit’s focus on language, collaboration, and the layered wordplay of its title: feng (风), meaning wind, and jing (景), meaning scene — together forming fengjing (风景), or landscape.
This spirit of collaboration was woven into every stage of the exhibition’s creation. Lighting designer Qier Luo noted that she, along with sound designer Jinling Duan and visual designer Yaya Zhang, intentionally selected both the gallery space and the time of day to take advantage of how evening sunlight streamed through the windows, casting shadows of the chimes, the guzheng-like sculpture, and the visitors themselves onto the walls.
“This space really spoke to the simplicity and purity of ‘less is more,’” Luo said. “It helped us clarify our ideas — not to teach, but to guide people toward a place of meditation.”
Originally titled Good Luck—a nod to the traditional belief that wind chimes bring fortune — the exhibition unfolded in ten-minute cycles of sound and movement. At the end of each interval, one of the three designers would invite a guest to pull a lever at the end of the installation — with each sonorous click and tightening of the metal strings across the space of the gallery, the chimes would slowly still, lights dim, and the music fade away.
After each cycle, the sudden absence of sound was striking. “Things always have two sides,” Luo said. “We wanted to explore how silence can represent suspension or violence.” Duan’s soundscape, composed the night before the opening, used a synthesizer to evoke the tones of traditional Chinese instruments, blending the music with human voice and the physical sounds of the installation. Without this aural translation of wind, memory, and emotion, the electric hum of the gallery and the soft, human ambient noise of its visitors became unexpectedly pronounced — almost eerie.
“I stayed in there for a long time because it was so incredibly peaceful,” Windscapes visitor and Yale School of Art Dean Kymberly Pinder said. “I also really enjoyed how the shadows were so well curated by the wind and the chimes, that they had such depth it was like looking at a painting on the wall.”
