Image: Supplied
Image: Supplied
Fresh from a headline-grabbing debut at ComplexCon Hong Kong and already turning heads with her collaboration on Gucci’s Spring/Summer 2025 collection, Gucci Bamboo: Decoding an Icon, Yanran Chen is proving one thing: the future doesn’t just belong to Gen Z—it looks like her.
At just 19, the Beijing-born artist is more than a prodigy. She’s a force, building bridges between surrealism, streetwear, and high fashion. Her work looks like something out of a sci-fi dream: ghostly girl characters wrapped in plastic, with split heads and glowing eyes.
Her signature style, mysterious girl-like figures wrapped in plastic with split heads and digital eyes, isn’t just for show. It reflects how she sees the world: creative, hard to pin down, and always ahead of the curve.
Image: Supplied
Image: Supplied
People called her 2024 solo show NOWHERE in Tokyo her big moment. What they didn’t know? She’s been in the game since she was three. Her art was displayed at the World Expo by the time she was eight. At 13, she started doing illustration. At 16, she moved to Japan to study. Now, she’s deep into experimental art at Rhode Island School of Design in the US.
“I’m not a prodigy,” she says matter-of-factly. “Those so-called 'overnight successes' are really just the honest result of long-term accumulation.” For her, every sketch, every failed experiment, every overwritten line is a piece of that timeline.
Image: Supplied
Image: Supplied
At ComplexCon, her installation felt more like a sci-fi movie set from the future than an art booth: a ROBBi collaboration featuring the “Ember” sculpture pulsing with mechanical veins; anime figures adapted from The Supernova Era with nebulae of binary code in their eyes; and in her new work Dinner, silicon-based lifeforms feast on a high-tech apple.
This isn’t surrealism as dreamy escapism—it’s a blade of philosophical critique aimed at the ethics of technology. “The girl figures are my spiritual avatars,” Chen explains, pointing to characters entangled in translucent plastic and metal halos. “They exist between the metaverse and the physical world, completing my existential questions for me.”
Her Gucci collaboration? Just as sharp. Bamboo Realm, part of the Spring/Summer 2025 collection, was set in a historic Shanghai villa and featured AI-generated pre-Qin manuscripts printed on nano-bamboo. Time travel, but make it couture.
Image: Supplied
Image: Supplied
As AI-generated aesthetics flood the creative world, Chen is strikingly grounded. “When Midjourney can mass-produce 'surreal' images,” she says, “real rebellion is keeping the imperfections in.” On her studio wall hangs an unfinished draft, its character’s calf painted over and over again—an act of resistance against the pursuit of seamless digital perfection.
This idea runs through her Mechanical Lifeforms series, where rough welds and offbeat gears are part of the message. For Chen, real beauty isn’t perfect and her work proves that even machines can be more interesting when they’re a little rough around the edges.
Image: Supplied
Image: Supplied
Her new animated series, Supernova Playground, shows just how big she’s thinking. It’s a wild mix of cute, chibi-style characters and deep sci-fi stories—made to be collected, pulled apart, and understood on more than one level.
“The best kind of cross-disciplinary work isn’t just mixing mediums,” she says. “It’s embedding subversion in every single one.”
While most artists her age are still figuring out their style, Chen is already changing the game. She mixes art and objects, fashion and big ideas, street style and deep emotion - blending it all into something bold, surreal, and completely her own.
In a world full of endless images and online noise, Yanran Chen isn’t just another Gen Z creative—she’s shaping how the generation sees itself. The melting clocks in her work aren’t just nods to Dalí; they’re a challenge to time, tradition, and the very idea of creative limits.
She’s not breaking the rules. She’s replacing them.