While the overly talented 17-year-old illustrator, Chloe Yanran Chen, manages both Instagram and Twitter accounts where she puts up exquisite illustrations inspired by “horror comics, dreams, humanity and time”, she also displays incredible fashion outfits on her wall. Apart from her illustrations, Chen equally aspires towards fashion blogging, to which she models peculiar fashion styles on her Instagram page. Through her art and style, she has been prominently featured in notable fashion magazines like Wonderland and luxury brands like Balenciaga.
Chen’s fashion style is simple yet chic. Her outfits range from casual ensembles like Reglan-sleeved shirts and miniskirts over knee-high boots which are soothing and comfortable for the everyday young girl to simple designs like long button-down coats and pants.
She has T-shirts designed with some of the illustrations on her page. Unlike the trending fashion wave of outweighed elegance and style, Chen’s fashion sense is apt for the recluse, the sensible and the classy. Her aesthetic is neither lavish nor immoderate. With proper sense of artistry, Chen has proven to have such delicate taste for casual yet outstanding outfits.
While it is the case that Chen’s drawings possess an otherworldly aura with figures which may outwardly instil frightfulness, a closer gaze at the illustrations reveal an underworking summing up the trio – life, art and mysticism.
It is not untoward for artists to seek a stark representation of physicality or reality. Yet, Chen’s illustrations dare to stray from the conventional, to invent a reality which thrives and portends life solely within the art piece itself. In the Bazaar interview, the young illustrator is confirmed to have remarked thus: “Having exposure bothers me. Being unplugged from reality helps me feel safer, so sometimes I’ll cut myself off from the outside world.” Chen’s bid to ‘unplug’ herself from an unsafe reality thus provides the springboard to which the 17-year-old has yielded herself into creating mystical worlds through her illustrations wherein both life, art and the mysterious all peacefully co-exist therein.
In a piece titled ‘Swallow It’, the illustration brings to mind the Adamic myth all gearing towards realization and a sense of open-eyedness. The piece features a one-eyed young girl in the first slate who is yet to taste the scruffy material in her hands; in the second slate however, the young girl is able to raise the material to her lips, evidently tasting it. In this second slate, the green-haired girl possesses a second eye and the sense of speech, to which she comments: ‘I like the taste of it’. While Chen’s illustration addresses the coming-of-age or becomingness of personhood, there is also the bitterness and deceit which seems to accompany it. While the figure in the illustration has tears coursing down her eyelids, she insists on proclaiming a lie, on claiming to love that which evidently causes her tears.
Chen’s illustrations are highly symbolic. Not only do the illustrations lead right back to the diagonal route of life and existence, they in fact question the very roots on which ‘growth’ is considered.
In another unnamed piece which the young illustrator captions as ‘wip’ on her Instagram page, the boundaries between the humane and the mysterious are further blurred to considerable limits. While the typical young girl figure which tends to recur in most of Chen’s illustrations wields a butter knife and fork, the elemental structures like the trees behind her are suggestive of mystery. They are a radiant green shade streaked with a lighter green tone and the posture which they adopt is rather unlikely for ordinary trees. With a close look, the trees take the shape of claws or fingers flailing in mid-air. The conflation of the real and the unreal, the mundane and the mysterious is the very juncture which Chen’s illustrations spring to life with unconventionality.
That the young illustrator is a very talented person, cannot be overemphasized. Navigating the world at seventeen and producing illustrations imbued with such heft of creativity only foretells the immense potential which Chen possesses. While she gradually confronts the daily conflict of thriving in a real and unsafe world, Chen equally slouches towards unveiling a world where safety is evident in the co-existence of the mystical and the ordinary.
In one of her creations, equally unnamed but captioned as ‘Wednesday Sketch’ on Instagram, Chen brings to bare the world of mystic. The real-life doll is circumscribed in rings and rings of snakes and several other fantastical creatures. The appearance altogether suggests a transcendental universe wherein the lifeless takes life and the dead remains undying.
Summarily, Chen’s illustrations are unconventional. They seek to escape the bounds of realness while posing somewhat difficult questions to the very foundation of existence, growth, being and humanity. Combined with the illustrations she puts out, Chen’s fashion sense is equally up and thriving, another prominent sector of her life which holds great potential as she aims toward fashion blogging.
The emerging artist may be found on Instagram @yanran_chen_ or Twitter @chloeranran.
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