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Photography

I Am Not a Serious Person— Poyen Chen’s Latest Zine

May 29, 2026

Artist Poyen Chen's latest work in collaboration with Dashwood Books, I Am Not a Serious Person, is a collection of images that play with the objects and illusions of reality. After his father’s cancer diagnosis, Chen’s understanding of reality began to shift.

“For the first time, I saw the parts of myself I once believed were strong become vulnerable. I started questioning what felt real, what could be trusted, and how easily certainty could disappear.”

The collection features distorted and embellished images of the human face and body, juxtaposed with grounded, realistic images that serve as a contrast. This tension mirrored Chen’s own experiences and coincided with another subject he wanted to explore in his work: AI-generated art. A particularly charged topic within the art community right now, Chen sought to deconstruct the notion that art created without emotion— art by generation— could never fully replace what is real.

I Am Not a Serious Person strives to be so much more than something easy to generate, or even merely experience. The collection is rooted in Chen’s attempts to capture distortion, failure, humor, emotion, and meaning within this generative reality.

Text by Bernice Nguyen

Photography

Fallen Angel

September 09, 2025

Suspended between sky and steel,Her body drifts into flight.Rooted in strength,Bending, never breaking,She leans into gravity,Then slips past its grasp.

To Fall Is to Begin

Once you’ve hit the pavement, the only thing left to do is rise. Panic swells in free fall, not because of the air itself, but because of the surrender — the loss of control, the certainty of impact. And yet, from the fall, everything begins.

We are taught to glorify ascent — victory, progress, triumph. But the fall deserves equal, if not greater, reverence. Collapse is not an ending but a shedding: uncomfortable, even painful, yet essential to our becoming. It strips away what no longer serves, what sheer will alone could not release, opening the door to renewal.

Held by the earth,Touched first by the sky,Whispers from the heavens —Embraced, never forgotten.

The Ground That Remakes Us

Strength reveals itself not as resistance but as surrender — the willingness to break open so that something new can take shape. Falling becomes a form of liberation, untethering you from what has been outgrown.

Flight is not constant and the falls you take will not always be kind. Yet you rise, higher for the ground you struck and lighter for the weight you released.

Between breath and silence,Weight and release,She moves —With fragility and power,A quiet force.

A Threshold to Becoming

Trust the body as it yields, the ground as it steadies, and the sky as it opens.

What seems like collapse is in truth transformation. The ground is not the end, but the threshold — the passage through which we are remade.

Balanced at the edgeOf collapse,Becoming.