Surreal Sculptures Blend Human Forms With Futuristic Machine Aesthetics

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A post shared by Yanran Chen/Chloe Chen (@iam_chloec)

At just 20 years old, Yanran Chen (aka Chloe Chen) is already building an expansive artistic universe, one where sculpture becomes a vessel for identity and the uncanny. Best known for her dreamy, manga-inflected visual language, the rising Chinese artist extends her practice beyond illustration into sculptural works that feel both futuristic and deeply human.

Chen’s early immersion in drawing and later studies at institutions such as the Rhode Island School of Design and Kyoto Seika University shaped her hybrid aesthetic, which pulls from anime, sci-fi, and experimental cinema. Her sculptures, however, are where this visual language fully materializes.

Often rendered with hyper-smooth, almost synthetic surfaces, Chen’s three-dimensional works merge soft, doll-like human features with mechanical or cybernetic forms. In pieces like Nightmare Robot (2024), multiple eerily lifelike faces emerge from a compact, machine-like body, suggesting fragmented identity, artificial consciousness, and the tension between organic emotion and technological form.

This fusion of the intimate and the artificial is central to her practice. Drawing from dreams and speculative futures, Chen creates sculptures that feel like artifacts from an alternate reality, uncannily familiar yet slightly unsettling. Her works often echo the visual logic of comics and gaming culture, while pushing into more philosophical territory about what it means to exist in a digitized world.

These ideas come together most clearly in her 2025 exhibition Neon Dreamland, presented at Art Focus in Beijing. The immersive show featured a series of collectible and large-scale sculptures alongside paintings and installations, inviting viewers into a fully realized “dreamscape” where reality and fantasy dissolve into one another.

Rather than existing as standalone objects, Chen’s sculptures function as characters within a larger narrative ecosystem. Some resemble avatars or companions, while others feel like emotional extensions of the artist herself, capturing states of anxiety, nostalgia, and transformation. This approach aligns her with a new generation of artists who treat sculpture not just as form, but as storytelling.

Despite their polished, almost toy-like appearance, Chen’s works carry a quiet emotional weight. They ask viewers to consider how identity shifts in an age shaped by screens, avatars, and virtual presence, where the boundaries between the physical and digital self continue to blur.

With her sculptural practice still evolving, Yanran Chen is already carving out a distinct space in contemporary art, one where tenderness, technology, and surrealism coexist in striking, otherworldly form.

Artist Yanran Chen creates surreal sculptures that combine doll-like human features with sleek mechanical forms to introduce a dreamlike, futuristic world.

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A post shared by Yanran Chen 陈嫣冉 (@yanran_chen_)

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A post shared by Yanran Chen/Chloe Chen (@iam_chloec)

Drawing from anime, sci-fi, and personal memory, the sculptor creates hybrid figures to explore identity and artificial consciousness.

@ocula.art In her debut China solo exhibition, the 20-year-old artist Yanran Chen transforms Tang Contemporary Art’s new space, ART FOCUS, into a portal between fantasy and reality. ‘I want people walking into this exhibition to feel like these things have appeared in your mind before—but now they’ve become real,’ she told Ocula. On the first floor, paintings, sculptures, and even her own studio table invite viewers into her personal dreamscape. The second floor reveals an entirely different realm—a sci-fi collaboration with anime label WaarWorld, based on Liu Cixin’s ‘The Supernova Era'. Here, sculptural characters from the ‘Players Series’ blend post-human aesthetics with playful surrealism, shown in full for the first time in China. Curated by Yuan Hong and presented as part of Beijing Art Season ‘Neon Dreamland’ opens today and is on view until 6 July. Discover more exhibitions to see in Beijing on Ocula—link in bio. #YanranChen #TangContemporaryArt #BeijingGalleryWeekend #Ocula ♬ original sound – Ocula