About me
Yi-Wen Chen
Digital Artist & Narrative Explorer
I am a Taiwanese digital artist, storyteller, and traveler whose creative practice moves between heritage, imagination, and emerging technology. My works often begin with the simplest encounter: a temple stone under sunlight, a child’s gesture, a plant swaying in the wind. From these quiet details, I build speculative worlds that blend memory, history, and future possibilities. Across Southeast Asia and beyond, I document the places I walk through—ancient ruins, forests, villages—and reimagine them through AI-driven visual experiments, short animations, and narrative prototypes. My goal is to create art that feels both intimate and expansive: works that invite audiences to rediscover the wonder hidden in ordinary things.
Artistic background
My artistic practice grows at the intersection of travel, digital media, and narrative imagination. With a background in literature and language, I approach visual creation as a form of storytelling—where landscapes, ancient sites, and everyday encounters become gateways to reimagining time. Over the past years, my work has evolved through photography, experimental video, and AI-assisted worldbuilding, exploring how memory, culture, and speculative futures can coexist within the same frame. Inspired by Southeast Asia’s historic sites and its living environments, I create works that bridge past and future, reality and imagination, inviting viewers to step into unfamiliar yet emotionally resonant worlds.
Portfolio_01
Timekeepers
Timekeepers is a dual-site visual meditation filmed across two distant temporal landscapes: one rooted in a 700-year-old Sukhothai ruin, and the other imagined a thousand years into the future. Juxtaposing past and future, human craftsmanship and artificial consciousness, the project explores how different eras “observe” each other across time. Through slow cinematic language and atmospheric worldbuilding, Timekeepers reflects on memory, continuity, and the silent dialogue between civilizations.
Portfolio_02
Travel Lizzy
Travel Lizzy is a warm, humorous, and slightly whimsical micro-story series that follows Lizzy the little crocodile on her gentle adventures through a magical forest. Each short episode blends light-hearted comedy with quiet emotional insights, creating moments of comfort, empathy, and subtle wisdom. Designed as a healing series, Travel Lizzy aims to bring joy, softness, and a sense of companionship to viewers—while slowly building a larger narrative world for future animated works.
Portfolio_03
Botanical Fantasia
Botanical Fantasia is an experimental botanical-video project that transforms real plants from my travels into speculative magical species. Combining on-site photography, AI-assisted evolution, and worldbuilding design, the project imagines how familiar tropical flora might evolve in alternate timelines. Each transformed species is paired with a “before/after” botanical record and an imaginative ecological narrative, creating a bridge between science, myth, and visual storytelling.
Artistic Statement
My work explores the emotional and narrative space between reality and imagination. Through travel, I observe how landscapes—ancient temples, forests, markets, and ruins—carry layers of memory that invite reinterpretation. I use digital tools not to replace the real world but to converse with it, extending what is already there. Whether through speculative plants, future ruins, or whimsical characters, my goal is to create visual stories that help viewers slow down, reconnect with wonder, and sense the quiet continuity of time. I see art as a bridge across eras, allowing us to inhabit the past, present, and future at once.
