House of Words is an outdoor installation, functioning as an oversized musical instrument at the Grand Park in Los Angeles.

Like a friendly colossus that hovers over the public, this interactive structure listens to its visitors and re-state what it hears in its own gentle but deep voice. While standing underneath the belly of this behemoth, a person can whisper a secret into the receptors. However, like a bad secret-keeper, this creature carelessly echoes everything back into the ether, albeit very quietly and in a heavily distorted and unrecognizable utterance.

In the final scene of the movie, In the Mood for Love (2000), the protagonist whispered a secret into a hole at a temple and covered it with mud. Symbolically, this gesture is an act of self-healing as he confided with the building by quietly narrating his sorrows in private. Unlike the covert nature of this mud hole, The House of Words scrambles the words spoken to it like a paper shredder. The new and uplifting sounds are like bird songs, free of its former meanings and no longer comprehensible to humans. The act of divulging a burdensome thought is a therapeutic act - like a speech monster that eats and digests away a person’s words, this project is a sounding board for the heavy-minded Angelenos to tell their stories to.