For a fleeting moment this spring, Brooklyn’s A Space Gallery will host the dreamlike world of Qiaosi Chen, a New York-based multimedia artist originally from Fuzhou, China. Chen’s solo exhibition Everything Was True For A Moment runs from April 25 to May 8, 2025, inviting viewers to explore an intuitive, fragmented universe of memory and myth.
Now in his mid-twenties, Chen has already distinguished himself through vibrant group shows and digital art festivals, from Notyet Art’s Unbound Variable (2024) to the event team credits at UAAD Jukebox of Dissonance art festival, and to the incoming 2025 Focus Art Fair. His installation Sacred Tree, a symbol-laden ritual space melding mythic narrative with pop culture, earned him Gallery 4%’s Faces & Features award in 2024. All these milestones set the stage for Everything Was True For A Moment, Chen’s New York solo debut and a culmination of his emergent vision.
A Fragmented, Intuitive Practice
Educated as both an engineer and a designer at NYU, Chen brings an interdisciplinary sensibility to his art. Yet he does not attempt to neatly fuse the rational and the mystical; instead, he moves fluidly between science and mysticism, control and chance, rationality and emotion. His creative process is “not calculated but felt” – born of impressions that surface unexpectedly from the subconscious, from “the edges of emotion where language fails”. Working across installation, photography, video and personal narrative, Chen constructs what the gallery describes as a “fragmented, non-linear visual language” revolving around memory, metaphor, and sensation.
Ordinary materials (a branch, a piece of driftwood, a disco ball) are never merely objects in his work but are imbued with emotional and symbolic charge. In these constructed environments, they become “living metaphors”—part of a private mythology that hovers “between sincerity and illusion, randomness and coherence”. Chen’s gestures and images resist grand narrative; instead, they trace a slow, searching response to the question of “how do we feel the world?”. The result is an artistic voice that is hesitant and erratic, at times opaque, yet prone to sudden flashes of clarity—“like signals flickering into focus through a field of static”.
There is a persistent sense of instability in Chen’s practice, a feeling that reality itself might be slightly unmoored. His work often emerges from fragmented experiences, weaving dreamlike encounters with the everyday into temporary systems of meaning. “My inspirations spread like wild grass or scattered stars,” Chen notes of his process. Seemingly disconnected images and ideas grow “chaotically yet organically”, until patterns quietly emerge and “the seemingly meaningless accumulates into something tangible”. This intuitive, non-linear approach means that Chen’s installations and images don’t present tidy stories or didactic messages. Rather, each piece is an open-ended narrative, a collage of impressions where the emotional resonance matters more than any literal interpretation. “They are not about accuracy, but about resonance,” Chen explains of his works. In other words, meaning in his art is often a whispered secret—felt in the gut, even if it can’t be fully articulated.
Myths, Dreams, and Momentary Truths
Lately, Chen’s practice has leaned further into the accidental and the unresolved. Rather than beginning with a clear concept, he often starts from scattered emotional flashes—an image glimpsed in a dream, a fragment of overheard conversation, or the lingering atmosphere of a place. These fragments rarely make immediate sense, but through repetition, layering, and recombination, they begin to speak to one another. What may seem like “melody” slowly arranges itself into a kind of emotional cartography—maps that chart not certainty, but the flickers of feeling and meaning that briefly surface, then dissolve again. In this process, Chen no longer tries to control narrative flow, but lets associations guide structure—embracing drift, digression, and return. In Chen’s cosmology, dreams are no less valid than waking facts; the two sit side by side, their boundaries blurred.
Fittingly, the title Everything Was True For A Moment encapsulates Chen’s philosophy that a fleeting perception can crystallize into meaning, however transient. “Rather than asking what is definitively real, these works ask how reality is constructed through perception, projection, and emotional resonance,” Chen writes in his artist statement. Like pareidolia – the tendency to see familiar patterns in random information – his art invites viewers into brief alignments of form and feeling, moments when disparate fragments coalesce into significance. In that flicker of insight, “something becomes true, if only for a moment”. That momentary truth, fragile but powerful, is the very reason his structures exist. The exhibition’s works do not promise any permanent revelation or grand epiphany. Instead, they offer instants of clarity amid ambiguity – a collage of sincerity and illusion where the viewer’s own memories and senses might complete the story.
Symbolic Encounters and Emotional Resonance
Several key works from Chen’s emerging oeuvre illuminate his unique visual language. In Penglai, a photographic series named after the mythical island of immortality, the artist’s mundane bathroom transforms into a surreal tableau. A gold-painted tree branch sprouts from the bathtub, while Chen’s own body, coated in black pigment, becomes a physical manifestation of internal struggle—bearing the weight of anxiety, memory, and emotional residue. This uncanny mise-en-scène brims with symbolic materiality: the organic and the artificial entangle, and the private space of bathing becomes a stage for mythic introspection. Penglai exemplifies Chen’s gift for turning familiar environments into “temporary systems of belief”. The piece feels like a ritual in search of an elusive self – a suspended moment where identity is ambiguous and fluid.
In the installation Brave New World, Chen continues his play with unlikely juxtapositions. A weathered piece of driftwood, imagined as a relic from another realm, stands beneath a small mirrored disco ball that hangs like a synthetic sun. The pairing is strange but deliberate: one evokes the remains of a collapsed myth, the other the seduction of performance and artificial light. Rather than suggesting harmony or contrast, the two form a precarious structure—charged with tension, memory, and a quiet farewell to inherited meaning. Together, these elements “blur the boundary between the sacred and the synthetic”, as Chen says, creating a contemplative farewell to inherited ideals and externally imposed identities.
Brave New World isn’t a search for any ultimate truth, but rather a gentle rebellion – a way of reconstructing meaning on the artist’s own terms. Similarly, in Sacred Tree (2024), which Chen conceived as his graduate thesis, organic forms and spiritual symbolism merged to form an immersive altar of memory. That work’s resonant exploration of myth and spiritual totems earned it a place in the Unbound Variable exhibition and the accolade mentioned earlier. Across these pieces, Chen’s approach remains consistent: he assembles fragments of narrative, materials charged with metaphor, and personal reflections into scenes that viewers can sense intimately even before they understand them intellectually.
Poetics of the Fleeting Moment
Walking into Everything Was True For A Moment, visitors should not expect a straightforward story or a didactic theme. Instead, Chen offers an experience that unfolds slowly, intuitively, atmospherically, and deliberately unresolved. Rather than guiding the viewer toward a single reading, the work invites immersion, reflection, and quiet entanglement. Each artwork is a gateway into Chen’s introspective world, inviting the audience to participate in meaning-making: to follow a thread of memory here, a glint of metaphor there, and to trust their own emotions as much as their logic. The atmosphere of the exhibition is one of soft-spoken mystery. Chen’s works carry a “soft honesty” – they are unassuming and unresolved, unbothered by any pressure to explain themselves fully.
What emerges is a quietly profound journey. In the gentle chaos of Chen’s installations and images, one may recognize the outlines of one’s own dreams and recollections. The exhibition space unfolds like a fictionalized landscape—part ritual site, part psychological construct. At its center, a piece of driftwood lies embedded in a bed of black soil, as if resting after a symbolic passage. Suspended above, a mirrored disco ball glimmers like an artificial sun, casting fractured reflections across the room.
Around the space, photographic prints are arranged like fragments of thought or memory—offering no clear narrative, but suggesting an atmospheric logic. Rather than recreating lived experience, Chen constructs a simulated mental terrain—where emotion, symbolic matter, and cultural residue are reorganized into a dreamlike system of meaning. It is not a place of return, but of projection—an imagined stage where perception quietly rearranges itself. By the time one leaves the gallery, perhaps nothing definitive will have been learned – yet something will have been felt. In that moment of resonance, however brief, everything was true for a moment, and that is more than enough.
Everything Was True For A Moment is on view at A Space Gallery (13 Grattan St., #402, Brooklyn, NY) from April 25 through May 8, 2025. The opening reception will be held on April 25, 6–8 PM. Visitors are invited to step into Qiaosi Chen’s world of flickering truths and fragile myths – to piece together the poetry in the fragments, and to find, if only for a moment, their own reflections glimmering back.
Article by: Chloe Wang
