Yinuo Chen
DIGITAL
Yinuo Chen is a Chinese-American new media artist whose work explores the preservation of personal and cultural memory—particularly that of the “Other”—within digital spaces. After earning her BFA with honors in Interactive Media Arts from NYU Tisch, she worked as an AI Creative Producer at BlueFocus, directing AI-assisted campaigns for major clients like Lenovo and JD.com. In 2024, she led CG and virtual production for Last Call by Winnie Cheung, which premiered at the 2025 SXSW Film Festival. Currently pursuing her MFA in Game Design at USC, Yinuo also freelances as a 3D artist, contributing to films, music videos, and the indie game World of Dogs, with recent collaborators including Alice Longyu Gao x Danny Brown, Eartheater, and 11 Li Jiayi.
APRIL 2, 2025
What first drew you to coding as a medium for creative expression?
I first got into creative coding during the pandemic lockdowns. For some reason I was placed under a 2 week mandatory lockdown in a mermaid themed hotel room in Shanghai Disneyland when I flew back to China. Everyday I could hear people screaming out of joy and exhilaration from the freaking roller coasters outside of my window, it drove me nuts. I had to pull my focus on something that was distracting enough, and the media that ended up saving my mind was Daniel Shiffman’s YouTube channel, The Coding Train. Learning p5js on my own demanded intense focus, which helped me tune out the chaos around me.
How do you define digital materiality, and how does it inform the way you shape experience?
To me, digital materiality is about how intangible data can still hold emotional weight—how the digital can act as a vessel for memory. I’ve always seen the internet as a space where physical experiences can be preserved or replayed. I started making monthly Spotify playlists during the pandemic. Now, whenever I want to revisit a specific moment in time, I just listen to that month’s playlist.
That impulse to archive shows up in my work as well. Each project becomes a kind of time capsule—a fragmented, sometimes encrypted version of the past. But there’s also something fragile about digital artifacts, especially once they’re online. They’re subject to erosion through reinterpretation; meaning gets layered, diluted, or even lost as others project their own perspectives onto them.
How have you navigated interdisciplinary interests to cultivate an artistic direction?
I think for me it’s always ideas before technicality? If I find something interesting I’ll overlook the technical part and just start . Start with anything and learn the annoying but necessary technical knowledge on the way there. I just end up becoming really good at finding the right words to describe my question on google. Working across different software and hardware platforms over time has given me a sort of operating logic I can draw from when starting new projects. It allows me to prototype quickly, experiment freely, and ultimately gives my artistic vision more legroom to grow in both scale and scope.
How do you aim for your audience to engage with your work?
I tend to approach the world with a sense of doubt and uncertainty, as a method for understanding people and systems more holistically. I think questioning is a powerful tool for empathy.
In that same spirit, I hope my work encourages audiences to examine their own assumptions and perspectives. I’m less interested in providing answers and more interested in creating space for reflection—where people can sit with ambiguity and maybe see the world a little differently.
How do you balance structure and intuition throughout your creative process?
I first got into creative coding during the pandemic lockdowns. For some reason I was placed under a 2 week mandatory lockdown in a mermaid themed hotel room in Shanghai Disneyland when I flew back to China. Everyday I could hear people screaming out of joy and exhilaration from the freaking roller coasters outside of my window, it drove me nuts. I had to pull my focus on something that was distracting enough, and the media that ended up saving my mind was Daniel Shiffman’s YouTube channel, The Coding Train. Learning p5js on my own demanded intense focus, which helped me tune out the chaos around me.
How do you define digital materiality, and how does it inform the way you shape experience?
To me, digital materiality is about how intangible data can still hold emotional weight—how the digital can act as a vessel for memory. I’ve always seen the internet as a space where physical experiences can be preserved or replayed. I started making monthly Spotify playlists during the pandemic. Now, whenever I want to revisit a specific moment in time, I just listen to that month’s playlist.
That impulse to archive shows up in my work as well. Each project becomes a kind of time capsule—a fragmented, sometimes encrypted version of the past. But there’s also something fragile about digital artifacts, especially once they’re online. They’re subject to erosion through reinterpretation; meaning gets layered, diluted, or even lost as others project their own perspectives onto them.
How have you navigated interdisciplinary interests to cultivate an artistic direction?
I think for me it’s always ideas before technicality? If I find something interesting I’ll overlook the technical part and just start . Start with anything and learn the annoying but necessary technical knowledge on the way there. I just end up becoming really good at finding the right words to describe my question on google. Working across different software and hardware platforms over time has given me a sort of operating logic I can draw from when starting new projects. It allows me to prototype quickly, experiment freely, and ultimately gives my artistic vision more legroom to grow in both scale and scope.
How do you aim for your audience to engage with your work?
I tend to approach the world with a sense of doubt and uncertainty, as a method for understanding people and systems more holistically. I think questioning is a powerful tool for empathy.
In that same spirit, I hope my work encourages audiences to examine their own assumptions and perspectives. I’m less interested in providing answers and more interested in creating space for reflection—where people can sit with ambiguity and maybe see the world a little differently.
How do you balance structure and intuition throughout your creative process?
I’ve learned to have a somewhat flexible structure for technical projects because I’ll always find something more interesting to work on top off, but I think mostly it’s intuition at this point . Not very efficient for the 3D pipeline but I have fun.
In your view, what core skills are most essential for building a sustainable creative practice?
Having a good posture and routine physical activities. I don’t have that so I’m trying to work on it. I think it’s important to let go of the” flow state” from time to time because I get so consumed in tweaking the most unnecessary minuscule stuff and I lose sight of the big picture. Zoom out and zoom in on an interval.
What personal qualities or habits do you believe support continuous artistic growth?
Constantly talking to people, friends family strangers etc this is where happiness is found this is where community is found this is how you make art u need to interact with the world around you. I’ve stopped looking inwards (maybe not so good in the long run but right now it feels nice) and I hyperfocus on the lives of the people around me.
Also, art is always political. As we see increasing efforts to defund cultural institutions and suppress political expressions, the role of the artist becomes even more urgent. With the rise of digital surveillance culture, I think we’re going to see more innovative and subversive works emerge—clever, poetic ways to resist censorship and give voice to the oppressed.