Neon Dreamland

YanRan Chens’ first solo exhibition in Beijing.

From soft manga aesthetics to surreal tech-laced tenderness, Neon Dreamland invites you into strange, intimate worlds where owls keep time and memories glitch. Unfolding like a living sketchbook, with dreamlike canvases and speculative figures inspired by sci-fi, grief, and future nostalgia, Yanran Chen dares you to reimagine reality with her debut solo exhibition in China. Running from May 23 to July 6, 2025, the Beijing-born, Tokyo-polished, and globally rising artist pulls viewers into a multiverse of strange sanctuaries and speculative skins. Curated by Yuan Hong, the show inaugurates the new Art Focus space under Tang Contemporary.

The exhibition begins in her studio, not literally, but emotionally. The curation mirrors how Yanran Chen thinks, what she surrounds herself with, how her pieces begin to breathe. Viewers wander through worktables, small sculptures, unfinished canvases, and details that feel lived-in rather than staged. The room is alive, intimate, unfiltered. The lines between process and outcome blur by design, creating a quiet invitation into her inner landscape. It feels less like a gallery and more like an encounter with thought in motion.

Neon Dreamland arrives at a pivotal moment for Chinese contemporary art, one marked by a generational shift. Artists like Chen are forging new paths by bridging the rich textures of local mythology with the pulse of global digital culture. Their work feels deeply rooted in Chinese heritage but is entirely unbound by geographic or stylistic expectations. While previous generations often grappled with post-socialist realities or institutional critique, Chen’s generation embraces fantasy, softness, and interiority. Her art does not shout; it shimmers, glitches, and whispers, inviting viewers to experience a subtler, more complex emotional terrain.

Her paintings offer a strange tenderness. Flesh merges with technology. Familiar shapes feel stretched, bent, reconfigured. There are gears, timepieces, wings, faces. A rhythm emerges: part manga, part subconscious debris, part something unnamed. It’s soft, and then it isn’t. What ties it all together is a constant undercurrent of transformation that feels almost inevitable.

Continuing the exhibition with WaarWorld, introducing another layer to Chen’s practice, collectible sculptures, Q-version figures, and narrative objects that expand on her interest in speculative fiction. Inspired by Liu Cixin’s The Supernova Era, this series has already made noise at ComplexCon, but here it’s presented as mythology. The figures are small, but the energy is cinematic. There’s a sharp edge to this room, a nod to gaming culture, sci-fi aesthetics, and the architecture of future nostalgia.

Her dreamscapes offers a gateway between the real and surreal, a dialogue between Zhuangzi and the butterfly, between Kafka’s beetle and Proust’s drowsy reverie. In these layered metaphors, Chen builds rich worlds that reflect both whimsical and profound imaginings.

“My inspiration often returns to the image of the owl,” says Yanran Chen. “In my imagination, owls are always surrounded by clocks, alarms, and gears—objects that seem to bend time. I love that strangeness, as if they can travel through dimensions, or even reverse time. Maybe this comes from my dreams, or maybe from deep unconscious connections I can’t name but can’t let go.”

Throughout the exhibition, recurring visual motifs surface like echoes: owls, alarms, clocks, mechanical limbs, emotional symbols, fragments of time and feeling caught in flux. In interviews, Chen has spoken about her fascination with time: how it moves through the body, how it distorts in dreams, under technology, or in the grip of grief. Her work taps into a shared vertigo, the digital overwhelm, the craving for something slower, something real.

But this vertigo isn’t disorientation for its own sake, instead it’s a quiet revolt, a refusal to glide numbly through the hyper-speed rhythms of the present. Serving as a call to pause, to locate stillness within chaos, to recover what pulses beneath the static. Her art becomes a mirror for our restless age, where moments fracture, memories flicker, and reality feels both hyper-connected and strangely hollow.

In this Neon Dreamspace, time cannot pass by in a traditional sense, instead it warps, loops and collapses in on itself. Chen’s world defies linear logic. The viewer floats, suspended in emotional latency, where no single moment is fixed and no version of the self is final. Her work suggests that we’re always in-between versions of ourselves, between the past and some speculative future, between the physical and the digital.

She invites us to confront the fractures between body and machine, presence and absence, memory and invention. Her figures and objects feel halfway into something else, transforming, glitching, recomposing. They vibrate with a strange tenderness, a kind of wounded hope. And in doing so, they ask: What does it mean to feel, to remember, to connect, when the tools that promise connection are the same ones eroding intimacy?

In Neon Dreamland, the surreal collides with the intimate, to soften the edges of reality, a portal into feeling and reflection, into the beautifully unstable process of becoming. Chen opens a world where we can drift inward, touch what’s tender, and remember what it means to be alive.

Neon Dreamland / YanRan Chen

Credits:

Artist: Yanran Chen / @yanran_chen_
Words: Irina Klisarova / @its.irka.bitch
Editor: Anca Macavei  / @ancamacavei

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