Exhibitions · 2024

Pluviophile – The Rain Lover: Inside the Scent Exhibition

Published: 24 July 2024
Language: English
Reading time: 2 min

Read this piece in Vietnamese: Đọc bằng tiếng Việt

First published in Vietnamese on 24 July 2024. Translated in 2026 and kept to the original.

Since then:

This piece introduced the exhibition in July 2024. The exhibition and the activities that went with it, including the Rain Story contest, have since ended.

Poster for Rei Nguyen’s scent exhibition “Pluviophile – The Rain Lover”: a figure in headphones among threads that fall like rain, with glass drops

Are you a “Pluviophile”, someone who loves the rain? Or are you simply drawn to the layers of feeling that lie deep within every scent? If so, “Pluviophile – The Rain Lover”, a scent exhibition by perfumer Rei Nguyen, is one to put in your diary this July.

Visual and olfactory art, perfectly matched

There is more to “Pluviophile – The Rain Lover” than the scents themselves: it is a feast for the eyes as well. The installations are laid out with a light touch, each in keeping with the theme of its scent, and they stir further feelings and associations in everyone who comes.

Visitors in headphones read description cards among white threads that fall like a curtain of rain, with red and blue-green glass drops hanging in mid-air · Clear glass drops hanging on fine threads, their shadows falling on a blue ground like slow rain · Close-up of a round glass drop holding a scent, hanging in soft blue light · A visitor in headphones, eyes closed, smelling a glass drop behind threads lit pink at the Pluviophile exhibition

Visitors in headphones read description cards among white threads that fall like a curtain of rain, with red and blue-green glass drops hanging in mid-air · Clear glass drops hanging on fine threads, their shadows falling on a blue ground like slow rain · Close-up of a round glass drop holding a scent, hanging in soft blue light · A visitor in headphones, eyes closed, smelling a glass drop behind threads lit pink at the Pluviophile exhibition

Step inside and you are struck at once by how finely scent and sound are woven together. The installations, placed deftly as accents, lead you from one poetic story of rain to the next. Each scent is presented in a distinctive raindrop, beside a vivid account of what inspired Rei Nguyen to make it, and the result is something quite out of the ordinary for the nose. Each note comes like a whisper, leading you gently through every shade of feeling, from joy and sorrow to delight and nostalgia. Beyond losing yourself in the installation and in scents full of feeling, there is plenty more to do at “Pluviophile – The Rain Lover”:

Amber glass bottles on a terrazzo table; someone holding a sheet of paper talks with the guests seated around it · Printed letters telling stories of rain, gently curled, hanging beneath a cluster of woven rattan lamps

Amber glass bottles on a terrazzo table; someone holding a sheet of paper talks with the guests seated around it · Printed letters telling stories of rain, gently curled, hanging beneath a cluster of woven rattan lamps

The Rain Story display

This distinctive installation draws on stories of rain. Each letter tells a different story and calls up feelings and memories of its own, carrying you, story by story, from the calm and the romantic to the fierce and the forceful.

Share your story of rain in the Rain Story contest

Leave your own story of rain at the exhibition: a moment, a fond memory or a feeling the rain holds for you. Together with Pluviophile, help paint a many-coloured picture of everyone’s stories of rain.

A visitor writing a story about rain by hand on cream paper, beside a pothos in a glass

“Pluviophile – The Rain Lover” should prove a singular and deeply felt encounter with art, waking every sense and stirring the memories that lie deepest in each of us. Come and lose yourself in its world of scent, and find the stories held in every drop of rain.