Chen Chuanduan: Between Dream and Universe

A blue glimmer vibrates beneath the skin, like a shard of comet still orbiting within. From this image begins Chen Chuanduan’s journey: not an escape into the abstract, but a stubborn return to the place where dream, memory, and universe touch. The artist says he has “lost the ability to dream of the universe”, so he shoulders the camera like an archaeologist of consciousness, digging through inner ruins to rekindle visions flattened by reality. The path unfolds as a constellation of visual series that work by resonance. The Meteor of the Blue Comet rises from an imagined impact: a meteorite passing through the body and leaving stillness, like a mute gift. The Cave is an Eternal Night constructs an underground elsewhere, populated by invisible lights and nameless sounds - a world that asks to be listened to more than seen. Specimen 84003 turns studies in planetary geology into optical poetry - notes of science that tremble with fantasy. In the background, Hugh Everett’s many-worlds theory becomes a metaphor for sleep - when a dream’s frequency aligns with a parallel universe, one slips elsewhere for a moment. Chen scans the night sky for trails, waits in caves for anomalous echoes, and assembles images like clues. He doesn’t merely weave dreams - he investigates. The invitation to the public is clear - follow the artist’s lens to reactivate that “cosmic imagination” each of us keeps, faint yet still pulsing, in some fold of memory.