"Neon Dreamland": A Journey Into Yanran Chen's Surreal World

Natasha Patidar | Jun 13, 2025 11:30 am | Add a comment | 174 reads

Last weekend, I stepped into a space that felt like stepping into someone else's subconscious – a neon-hued, oddly tender and strangely futuristic dreamscape. Yanran Chen's first solo exhibition, “Neon Dreamland,” housed in the newly opened ART FOCUS space in Beijing's vibrant 798 Art District, is less of an art show and more of a portal into an alternate dimension.

At only 20 years old, Chen has already established a distinct visual language: rooted in surrealism but infused with the glossy, fast-moving energy of anime, science fiction, and digital culture. Walking through the exhibition, I found myself repeatedly stopping, not just to admire the technical detail, but to process the emotional tension in the works. It's a world where innocence and eeriness coexist – where childhood nostalgia meets artificial intelligence.

The Surreal Made Personal

The first half of the exhibition is devoted to Chen's solo pieces: paintings and sculptures that feel like snapshots from a lucid dream. One piece that lingered with me was Dinner: a table scene drenched in acidic colors, where human and machine limbs seem to reach for something they can't quite grasp. It's bizarre, funny, and unsettling. But that's the thing about surrealism: It's never meant to be comfortable. It's meant to challenge your grip on reality.

Chen plays with scale, form, and color in a way that echoes Dali and Ernst, but her use of hyper-saturated neon tones and mechanical forms also makes it unmistakably of the now. The characters she creates are soft-eyed but vacant, organic yet synthetic, and they seem to float somewhere between cyborg and child. They're not real, but they feel real.

The Futurist Twist

In the second half of the exhibition, Chen collaborates with WaarWorld to introduce the Players Series, inspired by Liu Cixin's The Supernova Era. Here, the surrealism becomes more narrative. Each sculpture – accompanied by “Q-version” miniatures – tells a story of a post-human world where children inherit the earth after a cosmic catastrophe.

But even in this sci-fi context, Chen's surrealism remains intact. The characters are whimsical yet existential, dressed in bright uniforms and bubble helmets but holding expressions that suggest loneliness, confusion, and power all at once. The series plays with the contradiction between cuteness and control, a recurring theme in Chen's work that resonates in an age obsessed with avatars and digital identities.

“Neon Dreamland” is also the inaugural exhibition of ART FOCUS, a new space that feels less like a gallery and more like an interactive concept lab. There are QR codes next to each work, digital panels offering behind-the-scenes sketches, and even a section where you can remix the characters into your own storyboards. It's a refreshing shift from the typical “white cube” gallery setting, and it aligns perfectly with Chen's ethos: boundaryless, experimental, and rooted in cross-medium storytelling.

What stayed with me most after leaving the show wasn't just the imagery, but the mood – this lingering sensation of having visited someone's inner world that is both beautiful and broken. “Neon Dreamland” is more than just a debut; it's a declaration.