Yue Zhou’s Indoor Weather (2025) presents the domestic interior as a continuously shifting site rather than a stable spatial container. Rooted in Zhou’s autobiographical experience of extended time at home, the work proposes that domestic space is never merely architectural or geometric: it is continually reshaped by duration, habit, financial precarity and the psychological states of those who inhabit it. Zhou’s notion of an “indoor climate” names this instability. Like weather, the home becomes accumulative and mutable, conditioned by both the immediate circumstances of the inhabitant and broader social structures.
The formulation recalls Gaston Bachelard’s description of the house as “our corner of the world”. Bachelard notes that the house is “our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the world.”1 While the house has been conventionally framed as a space of intimacy, repose and protection, Zhou complicates the security of the enclosure. In Indoor Weather, the domestic interior cannot seal itself off from the conditions beyond its walls. Housing costs and financial precarity permeate the experience of home, blurring the distinction between shelter and exposure. The psychological and emotional state of the dweller alters the house, reconfiguring how the space is inhabited to perceived.
Zhou renders this permeability and entanglement visible through spatial dislocation and fusion. Flowers bloom across the living room like the vibrant spring; dense grey clouds hover above pieces of furniture. The architectural boundaries dissolve altogether: the windows fade away and the house drift upon water, opening onto a mountainous landscape. Bachelard challenges the distinct opposition between the inside and outside, arguing that their relation unfolds through countless diversified nuances. Zhou grants this ambiguity a form and a shade in their practice. The outside world surrounding the home seeps into it, while anxieties acquire palpable forms. Zhou uses clouds, vibrant vegetation and flowing water not as corresponding symbols of particular emotions, but as a manifestation of domestic atmosphere that resists to be neatly separated into psychological, architectural or social registers.
In Indoor Weather, Zhou examines the domestic interior as a space that is sensed through the body and the mind as much as it is visually perceived. Although no human figure appears, the shifting atmospheres of the home imply a body that has inhabited and endured over time. This relationship between bodily presence and spatial experience aligns with Gernot Böhme’s account of atmosphere. For Böhme, “space is genuinely experienced by being in it, through physical presence,” while “a mood contributes to sensing where we are.”i Zhou’s paintings pictorially translate this entanglement between presence, mood and environment. Instead of assigning affect to a depicted figure, Zhou distributes it across the domestic setting, allowing space itself to register the pressures and tensions. The indoor weather of the home becomes an active field in which physical conditions and psychic state continually press against and reshape one another.
Written by Kahyun Lee
