My work begins from a condition of
in-betweenness.
Moving to the United States from China at the age of thirteen, I spent much of my adolescence living with a sense of “permanent temporariness”.
sketches made during covid lockdown, 2019
I felt alienated from both my place of origin and my place of residence.
Existing as a perpetual guest in other worlds, I learned to construct narratives that rationalized my belonging within shifting environments.
Digital sketch, 2019
Digital sketch, 2019
What felt different..
Digital sketch, 2019
was never entirely unfamiliar.
I became drawn to the implicit tensions...
Self Portrait, 2019
...overlaps, and contradictions that surface within and between systems, whether cultural or technological.
Self Portrait, 2019
I understand these systems not as isolated entities, but as relational formations—constantly reshaped through internal instability and their encounters with the Other.
The spectator, 3D sculpture, 2020
As technological progress moves toward increasingly uniform and exclusionary futures...
I respond by introducing memory, ambiguity, and contradiction into systems designed to privilege predictability and control.
This condition of impermanence extends into my creative methodology.
I move across game engines, AI, and moving images in the same way I have moved between places.
I create work to acknowledge loss,
ritualize departure,
and soften the violence of erasure that often accompanies displacement.
This perspective has shaped projects that have been recognized internationally and have reached audiences both within and beyond institutional contexts
My AI-assisted short film The Ugly Truth merges my Photoshop, video, and sound-editing experience with AI-generated visuals to probe ethics, love, and inter-generational control in Chinese parenting.
The film received the Grand Jury Award and a $35,000 cash prize at the 2024 Global AI Filmarathon, Shanghai International Film Festival
"a pivotal work in modern feminist horror"
- Bloody Flicks
"Blumhouse, are you watching?"
- Nerds of Color
Last Call, for which I led CG and virtual production, explores intimacy, displacement, and cultural translation within the Asian diaspora in the West. The film premiered at the 2025 South by South West Film & TV Festival in Austin, Texas, and was later featured on NOWNESS, Deadline,
Women and Hollywood, and
Nightmare on Film Street
2025 SXSW World Premiere
2025 Best Short Brooklyn Horror
2025 The Locker Room Gallery - Snake Summer Group Show
2025 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art Solo Exhibition
2025 Fantasia International Film Festival Canadian Premiere
2023 NFMLA NewNarratives Grant Winner
Earlier, in response to the rise of racism and dehumanization of Asian women during the COVID outbreak and beyond, I created My Body Is Not My Home, an ongoing series of Unreal Engine short films that seeks to foster empathy for the virtual “Other.”
The project unexpectedly reached over three million viewers on social media, while also triggering a wave of racist and misogynistic harassment that flooded my inbox—an encounter with gendered hostility in digital spaces that continues to shape my commitment to using game art as a form of creative persuasion.
Through my practice, I have learned how to live without permanence, how to care without possession, and how to let things go without erasing their traces.
I draw upon both personal memory and the collective memory of the diaspora as a critical device,
one that allows me to soften, renegotiate, and counter the erasure of marginalized identities living within the synthetic and procedural logics of creative technology.
陳一諾
yinuo chen
About
one._.y1 / Yinuo / 陈一诺
Yinuo Chen (b.2000, Beijing) is an internationally recognized Chinese American new media artist currently living and studying in Los Angeles, California. She received a BFA in Interactive Media Arts from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and is currently an MFA candidate in Interactive Media & Games at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. Working across game engines, AI, and moving image, Yinuo’s practice reframes technology as a tool for memory preservation, transforming virtual worlds into contemporary mythologies where diasporic memory and displaced identities can be preserved and renegotiated.
