“As someone with a dual-cultural background, and who also, like everybody else, is trying to navigate the ever-changing contemporary experience, I’m interested in the idea of how personal memory, social collectiveness, and technological progression shape our conditioned reality. I am also interested in the otherness and unsettledness that comes with the experience of this exciting yet strange age.”

Siran (b. 1989, Beijing, CN) was born and raised in China before relocating to the US in his early 20s. Originally trained as an electrical engineer at Tianjin University, Siran moved to College Station, Texas to pursue a Masters in Visualization. This propelled him into the entertainment industry, moving around the US to work at large animation studios such as Laika and Blue Sky.

In recent years, Siran has shifted his focus in building his own artistic practice. His works and interests revolve around his emotional response to social surroundings as an immigrant, a queer person, and someone trying to navigate through the ever-changing contemporary experience. Siran describes “Living under these identities, I often need to confront a presence of uncertainty and fragility that lies ahead, and the inability to define and find a sense of belonging.” Siran’s process involves collecting and deconstructing visual references from collective consciousness. His visual archives include journalistic photos, social media images, memes, art historical images, religious art, etc. Siran then synthesize these fragments into cloud-like, quasi-landscape scenes. He describes the ‘cloud’ as both a representation of the data infrastructure, and a metaphor of how fluid and undefinable our state of being is at this stage of contemporary life. Through the process of deconstructing and re-assembling images, Siran’s work explores the theme of uncertainty and fragility that lies in our conditioned reality.