Smoke Gets in Your Eyes is an audio-visual total installation that reconstructs a replica living room based on an artist residency space Tianyi Zheng once occupied in The Hague. Originally an antique shop later refitted for the Hong Kong diaspora, the room becomes a vessel for memory — its found objects persisting through time as quiet witnesses to what has been left behind.
By recreating this space in Hong Kong, the piece explores the malleability of dwelling and the fluidity of memory. The boundary between past and future, fiction and reality, dissolves through interactions within the installation. Discarded objects act as repositories of presence, haunting viewers with the weight of lives they no longer contain.
Incorporating live performance, video, sound, and Arduino-driven elements, the installation asks what it means to inhabit a room that was never quite yours — and what it remembers that you have already forgotten.