Ruonan Shen’s “Dreamland” series is a fascinating study of a strained yet fragile relationship between the artificial constructs of humanity and the natural forces that rule our natural world. This series of long-exposure photographs, which comes from the Hequ Village farming areas of Pingshan County, Hebei Province, China, is a poetic conversation between the physical and the spiritual, stillness and movement, reality and surrealism.
But at a second look, the photos draw the viewer into a dreamlike space that seems frozen in time while still succumbing to the swerve of energy. The long-exposure method animates these static landscapes, transforming the invisible forces of wind and water and even fiery red molten lava into vaporous ghostly forms that drift like lost souls across the fields. These ghostly mist-blue swathes in the first image conjure the threshold between the material and the immaterial — the delicate beating of nature held in a form that lay beyond ordinary sight. The second image, on the other hand, adds a bright tip of color in the same outdoor scene. That translucent, kite-shaped body bursting with brilliant reds, greens, and blues apparently hovers just above the earth with a spectral grace. As though the man-made or artificial, represented in this case by a man-made kite or net, has been animated by its exposure to the very forces of nature. The tension between something as rooted as a forest as backdrop and this ephemeral, brilliant apparition accentuates the tension of permanence and temporariness; control and distraction. 
“Dreamland” offers an intense meditation on how human manipulations — signified via installations, or reed-stitched objects — engage with the wildness of nature. Shen’s art represents this unfolding of an experience in mutual vision not as a straightforward binary or oppositional relationship, but in the nuanced layers in between conflict and peace. These vague, ghostlike images produced by the prolonged exposure are metaphors for this struggle. At the same time, they are imprints of natural tribulations — wind, water, air — and the sight of human fabrications under them. In the photographs, at least the unnatural does not overtake or destroy the natural; they cohabit in an unstable equilibrium, indefinite and blurred, their boundaries. This complex equilibrium of form and sequence reflects concerns in today’s world about the environment and the human effect on ecosystems. Shen’s work invites reconsideration, in other words, of what the idea of “nature” might be — not a bucolic, untouched realm, but rather a world deeply imprinted by human hands and yet also susceptible to natural rhythms.
One of the most effective things about “Dreamland” is its use of time and motion. By this long-exposure method of working, Shen stretches moments into extended episodes, encouraging a meditative gaze that penetrates beneath the surface. In the first, the swirling blue mist seems to function as a sort of visual soundwave — an echo of the wind’s otherwise invisible presence — while in the second, the intense, dancing colors of the kite feel like an effusion of life in a static world. The stillness of the surrounding landscape (a hushed field surrounded by dark dense woods) grounds the images, but the active, semi-translucent shapes defy our understanding of space and mass. These things generate a sense of tension and release, implying that hidden within that which seems still there is a flow of becoming never at rest.
Hequ Village of Hebei Province, which serves as a physical backdrop, becomes more than a mere location — it takes an active role in the story. The place is itself liminal: it exists at the cusp between old world rural existence and the inevitable push of modernity and industrialization. Shen’s images don’t just record this place; they turn it into a stage for a far weightier inquiry into existence. The village’s open fields and surrounding woods represent boundaries between the natural wilderness and human dwelling, tradition and innovation, the permanent and the impermanent. With her painter’s eye, Shen turns this locale into a universal metaphor for the precarious lashings all communities feel in an increasingly shifting world.
Emerging artist Ruonan Shen, who has been studying Interior Design at University of Arts London in London, applies her fine-tuned conceptual practice to the medium of photography. While her main interest is in conceptual portraiture and constructed identity—particularly with a focus on gender and transformation—her contribution to “Dreamland” proves there is more to her than meets the eye as she deftly handles environmental and spatial issues. She relies upon staged environments and deliberate image creation that were derived from the minimal, theaterlike artifice of these interiors, apparent even in this series. The pictures are a constructed reality which express more than they show. They are meditative practices of image-creation as much as they are acts, holding intimacy and distance, inviting viewers into conversations with the scenes that seem both quiet and powerful.
And while “Dreamland” is a show about landscape and nature, it subtly reverberates with questions about identity and performance that animate Shen’s wider artistic inquiry. The man-made apparitions are visual shape-shifters in the natural world, switching identities on the fly as they respond to the elements. Using long exposure as a metaphor for change, she blurs lines, as Shen explores gender fluidity and self-presentation in her portraits. As the work crosses genre barriers—between environmental and bodily organism—it generates another layer of feeling, and these visualizations become spaces of insecurity, force and incoherence. For better or worse, identity works like landscape — constructed but also fluid, shaped by external forces but inherently resistant to fixed definition.
The real power of the series is its capacity to sit absurdity and beauty next to one another. It may seem surreal or nonsensical for a transmuted, man-made kite or net to evaporate into a rainbow-colored ghost over a field. But through Shen’s eyes, this absurdity is a poetic metaphor of coexistence and interreliance. Such tension invites reflection on how man-made creations exert themselves on nature, and how nature reasserts upon or intervenes in the work of man. It forces the anthropocene gaze and provokes us to acknowledge that nature is not a neutral setting for our deeds, but an actor amid them.
“Dreamland” is, finally, an invitation — a visual meditation that invites viewers to revisit some of the complications of modern existence. It’s a show that does not provide easy answers but does create a space where you can ponder how humanity charts its way within the intricate connectivity that nourishes life. In a world of gathering environmental decay and galloping technology, Shen’s photographs call to mind the delicate beauty at the skin-over point of those forces. They call us to reconsider our identity — not as conquerors of nature but rather as inhabitants of a common ecosystem in which harmony is attainable but only if we act to sustain it.
Ruonan Shen’s “Dreamland” is a hauntingly resonant series that rises above its visual splendor to address fundamental questions about art, identity, the natural world, and humans’ place in it. And with long exposure photography, it picks up traces not just of images but of time and experience: threads stretching with strands of tension, change and poetic ambiguity. It is a major addition to the current visual art conversation; technology and tradition, stillness and movement, artifice and nature speak in a deeply moving, haunting, beautiful and unforgettable way. “Dreamland” is more than just a body of photographs — it is a gentle but potent treatise on the unhinging equilibrium that constitutes our world.
