“As night’s curtain falls, the dreamscape quietly unfolds. When moonlight saturates the crevices of cerebral neurons, 24 million pixels begin to breathe. At the intersection of quantum fields and hormones, we capture the primal code of dreams. The fluorescent sea rises upon the retina; fragments of memory reassemble into luminous geometries, and metaphors from the depths of the subconscious acquire material form. Here, there is no gravity of reality—only the drift of consciousness, the flow of art, and the whisper of poetry.”
— Dr. Huang Xiao
“Oneiric Artscape, Phantasmagoric Visions” is the first public presentation of the Dream-making Laboratory’s outcomes, and also an artistic experiment that traverses the boundaries of media and consciousness. As the curator and also a poet, Dr. Huang Xiao (an associate professor, researcher, artist, and curator working at Krirk University, also the author of this article) invited three graduate students currently pursuing their Master’s degrees at the International College of the Arts, Krirk University—Zhou Xianda, Yang Jing, and Ge Qijie—to embark on an imaginative journey through digital painting, rooted in their most intimate and uncanny dreams.
Each painting is a fragment of a dreamscape, and Dr. Huang Xiao responds with poetry, using language to re-outline those moments that transcend reason yet brim with perception. This is not merely an exhibition, but a cross-disciplinary dialogue—between image and text, between dreaming and waking, between technology and emotion. AI technology, as a tool, gives form to imagination, enabling artists to render the elusive visions of their minds into concrete images; while poetry breathes emotion and rhythm into these visuals, allowing viewers to reflect in immersion and wander through contemplation. Detailed information as below:
A World of Visual Enchantment: Oneiric Artscape, Phantasmagoric Visions (Exhibition of Digital Painting Art)
Curator: Dr. Huang Xiao
Poems: Dr. Huang Xiao
Artists: Zhou Xianda, Yang Jing, Ge Qijie
Exhibition/Presentation 1. The Retreat and Unraveling of Sweet Dreams
(Digital Paintings by Mr. Zhou Xianda, Poems by Dr. Huang Xiao)
“The Retreat and Unraveling of Sweet Dreams” was inspired as one day I gazed out at a rain-drenched city. The concrete and steel structures stood cold and stark, exuding the weight of reality. In that moment, I suddenly recalled how, as a child, I loved to lose myself in sweet fantasies built from candy. Back then, I truly believed in places like Candy Mountains and Rainbow Bridges—magical realms that felt real and full of wonder.
But as I grew up, the pressures of reality and the clutter of everyday life surged in. Those pure, innocent fantasies seemed to slowly shift and dissolve in the “wind and rain” of the real world—like candy melting away under heat. I wanted to capture that feeling in my artwork: placing the candy mountains of fantasy side by side with the cold, looming cityscapes of reality. The melting of the candy becomes a visual metaphor for the transience of beauty, the compression of imagination under the weight of the real world, and the ongoing struggle between desire and reality.
This series was born from that impulse. I’ve always been fascinated by the pure sweetness of childhood dreams—those candy-built utopias—yet deeply aware of how easily such dreams fade in adulthood. At the same time, I hold a profound curiosity for the cosmos. Therefore I tried to merge these themes and imagine what an astronaut might see and feel from within a space capsule.
Through the astronaut’s eyes, the universe outside first reveals mesmerizing alien landscapes: spiraling vortices, crystal forests, floating mushroom isles—visions as dreamlike and sweet as childhood fantasies. But in the next moment, eerie graveyards and grotesque tentacles emerge in their place. This extends the idea of “the collapse of sweet dreams” into a cosmic dimension. The astronaut hopes to discover a candy-like utopia among the stars, only to realize that even in the vastness of space, beauty and fantasy melt away like sugar—corroded by the unknown and the unforgiving nature of reality.
Thus, this series seeks to explore how the fragile sweetness of dreams—once so vivid and real—inevitably succumbs to the erosion of reality, whether in the intimate world of childhood or the infinite expanse of the cosmos. — Zhou Xianda
Selected Artworks:
When Stardust Sweetness Collapses: Utopia at Its Melting Point
Poetry By Dr. Huang Xiao
Prologue: The Rain-Window Dialectic
Rain traces contour lines across the glass,
The entire city softens and warps inside a candy wrapper.
Childhood peels away with the foil,
Leaving behind a sticky longitude and latitude—
Candy Mountain swells from a crack in the desk,
While Rainbow Bridge is being devoured by the subway tunnel.
Act I: Candy Geology
We fused the cliffs with toffee syrup,
Rock candy quartz veins shimmered within chocolate fault lines.
But the rain arrived, laced with acidic ciphers,
And began dissolving the spiral staircase of lollipops.
Marshmallow clouds fell into coffee cups,
Becoming contracts written in foam.
Act II: Dreamscope of the Capsule
The astronaut’s visor reflects drifting nebulas.
Crystal forests grow upside down in zero gravity,
Mushroom isles float like scattered tablets.
Until a cluster of gravestones drifts past the porthole—
Their inscriptions in unknown scripts
Are, in truth, melting alphabet candy.
Act III: The Carnival in Mutation
The pupils of carousel horses fracture mid-spin,
Binary moss grows from the antlers of plum-blossom deer.
A gingerbread house releases bubbles deep undersea,
Like a crushed capsule of cough syrup.
Inside the cochlea of a giant stone statue,
Congealed honey and last words are tightly packed.
Act IV: Firefly Algebra
A chandelier of water pierces the skin of the pond.
Fireflies rewrite fairy tales in Morse code,
Stitching the rupture in sweet dreams with particles of light—
Until tentacled shadows rise from the depths,
Rolling the light dots into a starry lollipop
And stuffing it into the cavity of the universe’s decayed tooth.
Act V: The Gatherer of Omens
When the meteorite branded the sinkhole into the stratrum,
The music box was spitting out gears.
Those candy-colored teeth
Slowly grinding the silent compass.
The mountain peak suddenly opened its bloodied maw,
Swallowing a jellyfish-shaped cloud mass.
I stand on the edge of a tooth collecting starlight,
Shards of ice tinkling in my blood vessels.
When the moon began to rotate backwards,
All abysses erected strings.
Lost constellations surge from the depths of my eyes,
Condensing into glowing decrees.
Act Ⅵ: The Abyssal Beat
The meteorite brews honey in the pit’s depth,
The music box bites the evening wind.
Gears, with candy-colored fangs,
Dismantle the jellyfish’s compass.
In the depths of the mountain’s throat,
Drift molts of clock hands.
I devour phosphorescence and magnetic poles,
Smearing blood on the cliff's vinyl record.
When numerous abysses began their chorus,
The starry sky suddenly curled into a seashell.
Someone uses my spine
To gently tap the earth’s eardrum.
Act Ⅶ: Swing in the Abyss
The rotor of the seabed helicopter cuts through dark currents,
A swing idles in the clearing of agate coral groves.
Suddenly, crystal trees bear gingerbread houses,
From frosted windows, hymns of siphonophores drift.
Where the prehistoric colossus stands,
Swarms of butterflies overturn the geologic timeline.
Moonlight stored in their scaly wings
Is brewing submerged civilizations into bubbles.
When the pressure gauge blooms with pearl flowers,
All depths lose their meaning to measure.
Holding the anchor, I swing toward hydrothermal vents,
Watching granite gradually turn transparent.
Act Ⅷ: Circular Memory
Chimneys of the gingerbread house sprout crystal branches,
Agate corals spread across the living room floor.
The seabed helicopter hovers near the ceiling,
Its blades churning spots of emerald light.
That swing begins to move in reverse,
Carrying whispers from the ancient colossus.
Butterflies mend pottery cracks with phosphoric dust,
While dark currents translate cuneiform verses.
When the sigh of the Ice Age passes through hydrothermal vents,
All pendulums learn to curve through air.
I sit by the round window opened by a seashell,
Counting stars recalibrated by coral polyps.
Act Ⅸ: Geometry of Sweet Slumber
The brain monitor’s waves are stealing bubblegum,
Twenty-three kinds of sweetness drown the electrodes.
Unconsciousness is a palace of fruit drops
Where every pillar melts in lemon soda.
Pillows turn into expanding mica sheets,
Carrying me under candy crystal domes.
Eyelids sealed by grape gelatin,
Dreams are popping bubble wrap with forks.
Final Act: The Cosmology of Sugar Membranes
When the astronaut bites through the inner lining of the suit,
And tastes the sweetness at the center of the galaxy,
They finally understand: all utopias are sugar sculptures,
Collapsing slowly in the saliva of reality.
Along the event horizon of a black hole,
Shards of rainbow candy still drift.
Postscript: The Quantum State of Sweet Dreams
Candy Mountain collapses the moment it is observed,
Its melting stripes becoming folds in space-time.
We are both the children licking the stars,
And the astronauts suspended in syrup.
Within a superposition of sweetness and decay,
We weave breathing candy-coated tombstones.
Exhibition/Presentation 2. A Dream of Two Sister Souls
(Digital Paintings by Ms. Yang Jing, Poems by Dr. Huang Xiao)
“A Dream of Two Sister Souls” was inspired by a surreal experience of “synchronized dreaming” shared between me and my best friend. One morning, between 9 and 10 AM, we were each at home and messaged each other after waking up. Then, almost simultaneously, we both fell back asleep again—only to wake up past 11 AM and realize, upon exchanging our dreams, that we had both dreamed of a “strange school campus” as the central setting, though the atmosphere and content of our dreams were completely different.
In my dream, the tone was fantastical yet grounded in everyday life. My best friend and I were in a foreign-looking, unfamiliar campus. We entered a massive academic building that resembled a shopping mall. At one point, I went off to meet an online friend I’d never seen before—an enigmatic figure with long hair covering their eyes and single-lidded eyes. When I returned, I saw my best friend singing at a central booth in the mall; her recording immediately shot to the top of the charts. I, on the other hand, was surrounded by people gossiping about my relationship with the online friend and tried to avoid attention. On the way back, I felt a twinge of regret when my friend’s mother bought expensive apples just before we stumbled upon a cheaper vendor. The dream ended with us chatting in a hotel room, discussing the online friend and planning how I’d dress up to meet him the next day.
My best friend’s dream, in stark contrast, was like a horror film—full of dread and tension. In the same kind of “unfamiliar school campus”, she had to continuously complete missions to survive; failure meant being killed by red laser beams. She was in a constant state of being hunted, with relentless pressure throughout.
This sharp contrast—two dreams sharing the same setting but diverging into “fantastical everyday life” versus “horrific survival”—captured the deeper meaning of “twinness.” It reflects not only the relationship between my best friend and me, but also the dual nature of the dreams themselves: split yet symbiotic. From this, the digital painting series “A Dream of Two Sister Souls” was born. Through visual language, I aim to transform this cross-space dream resonance and the coexistence of opposing perspectives into surreal imagery—preserving this rare and intimate experience. — Yang Jing
Selected Artworks:
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Realm of Twin Mirrors
Poetry By Dr. Huang Xiao
Prologue: A Fracture in Morning Light
The pendulum strikes nine—splitting the morning glow.
At our separate windows, we receive the same cloud’s signal.
Unsent messages incubate behind the screen,
As drowsiness stitches time’s rupture back together.
By eleven before noon, two universes
Collide—suddenly—within a WeChat conversation.
My Theater: The Psychedelic Bazaar
The staircases of the school building rise like escalators,
Each floor a breathing marketplace.
Catfish in school uniforms glide beneath the glass dome overhead.
I walk toward the boy who is forever in profile—
The black fringe falling over his brow is a curtain,
Veiling a script yet to be written.
Her Cage: The Infrared Labyrinth
The same coordinates crystallize in another dimension.
Corridors sprout fangs; every door is a predator’s trap.
As she runs, shadows peel away from her back.
Lasers embroider a death flowchart at the nape of her neck.
The only emergency exit
Is always imprinted on the retina of the next second.
Twin Resonance: The Central Plaza
At this moment, I am walking through a courtyard overgrown with balloons,
Watching you on a stage refashioned from a candy shop.
You take the microphone—notes scatter into fireflies.
The ice pillar of the music charts vaporizes in an instant,
Even as the same tiled floor beneath your feet begins to crack open.
From the fissure, a task list rises, iron hooks reaching out.
Mirrored Deviation: Apples and the Hotel
The apples shimmer with a bronze hue inside the paper bag.
Price tags at the street corner stall suddenly begin to bleed.
Hotel bed sheets are printed with unsolved equations.
We debate which skin to wear tomorrow,
Unaware that the you in a parallel world
Is prying open a supply crate with a steel rod—
for the last remaining bullet.
Twilight Tower
The leaning tower stirs shadows into a cocktail.
Each window exhales the fog of a different season.
You lower a rope ladder from the top floor—
But the weaver is me, from the seventh layer of nightmare.
Between the bricks, a mixture of honey and rust seeps through.
Here, we trade dawns—your left eye for my right.
The Eerie Corridor
The rhythm of the columns pulses like a trapped ECG.
Hands within the murals continue to grow.
Your footsteps split in half as they enter—
One half tap-dancing after an infrared dot,
The other embedded in the videotape I bought,
Endlessly replaying the static hiss
of your chart-topping moment.
Symbiotic Ritual: The Final Frame
As thirty-two frames begin circulating blood,
The tendrils of poetry react with pigments in a chain.
At last, we decipher the trick of the replicated scene—
The strange campus is a vast womb,
Nurturing embryos of opposites in interdependence.
Each dream resonance is a twin blossom,
A cell division blooming within the amber of time and space.
Exhibition/Presentation 3. Dream-core is a romantic escape…
(Digital Paintings by Ms. Ge Qijie, Poems by Dr. Huang Xiao)
My design takes Dream-core as its soul and uses doors and windows as anchors, employing a surreal visual language to complete a poetic dialogue between “reality and dream, repression and freedom,” making “escape” a perceptible and resonant spiritual outlet. As traditional architectural symbols, doors and windows embody the cultural connotation of “connecting the inside and outside, carrying hope”; while the Dream-core style echoes Generation Z’s collective aspiration for “spiritual freedom and resistance to involution.” The combination of the two makes “escape” not only a visual spectacle but also an emotional projection of contemporary people’s desire to break through reality—achieving a temporary release from real-world pressures through surreal dreaming.
The opened doors and windows break the confinement of enclosed spaces, allowing sunlight, greenery, and schools of fish to pour in from the outside, symbolizing an “escape from a repressive reality” and injecting vitality and hope into the interior. In this series of images, doors and windows become symbols of “portals into dreams”—the swimming of the fish and the play of light and shadow transform real scenes into a “surreal dreamscape,” implying an “escape from the shackles of reality and entry into a realm of spiritual freedom.”
In some scenes, the opened door serves as a concrete vessel for escape—it breaks the constraints of enclosed space, linking the light, color, and atmosphere between interior and exterior, becoming a physical passage for “escape.” The stained-glass window acts as the “filter” of escape: shattered glass refracts into colorful specks of light, transforming the noise and chaos of the outside world into dreamlike fragments of color, rendering escape no longer a straightforward flight, but one imbued with poetic “filtering”—escape is not from reality itself, but from the heaviness and triviality of reality, slipping into a dreamscape woven from color and light.
When doors and windows open in a dark space, they reveal a bright world of ocean and sailboats. The dark room symbolizes the confined and repressive predicament of reality, while the seascape symbolizes a free and vast spiritual outlet. The movement of the sailboat further reinforces the action of “escape,” suggesting that escape is not a passive evasion, but an active pursuit of a broader spiritual realm.
Other scenes take arched doors and windows as core visual anchors, with a blue-green gradient as the main color palette. The cool-toned blue and warm-toned green create visual tension. The warm light outlining the exterior frame, combined with the warm light glowing from within, forms a “halo” that blurs the physical boundaries between reality and dream, while the “translucency” of light and shadow implies the possibility of “escape”. The ripple-like light fragments the real space, making “escape” no longer a single direction, but—through the fluidity of light and shadow—guiding the viewer to seek a “dream exit” amid the “fragments of reality.”
Dream-core often incorporates nostalgic elements. The interior furnishings (such as vintage furniture and wall decorations) create a space that feels “familiar yet oppressive,” alluding to the constraints of reality; while the “translucency” of doors and windows and the “freedom of butterflies” become visual outlets for “escape”—the fluttering of butterflies is both the embodiment of “escape” and a symbol of the awakening of “free will.” —Ge Qijie
Selected Artworks:
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Dream-core Architectonics
Poetry By Dr. Huang Xiao
Act I: Moonlight on Hinges
Doors and windows plant halos in the walls,
Every hinge sprouts bubblegum moons.
When fish schools bite through the wallpaper’s edge,
All rooms begin to breathe with gills.
Act II: Syrups of Star Remains
Stained glass wounds perpetually brew,
Distilling sirens into lemon syrup.
We kneel in the arched corridor gathering
Star-remains pickled in sea winds.
Act III: Butterfly Nets from Keyholes
Butterflies draw silk from keyholes to weave nets,
Capturing twenty years of stale twilight.
Furniture swells into jellyfish in the dark room,
Their tentacles adrift with unopened dawns.
Act IV: Sailing with a Candy Compass
A schooner sails across parquet floors,
Its compass a melted fruit-drop.
Undercurrents push bookshelves to grow fins,
As knowledge spreads in algal forms.
Act V: Music Box Escape Stairs
The emergency exit is crafted into a music box,
Each step bites into a different musical note.
When the pressure gauge blooms with pearl flowers,
We finally learn to ferry with our eyelids.
Act Ⅵ: Perching Dreams
Inside the hearth
Vines are revising fire’s testament
Translating ashes into
Migratory feathers
Each branch lifts
Invitations forgotten by seasons
Cultivating countercurrent springs
In the folds of brickwork
When moonlight begins
Arranging specimens with silver tweezers
All root systems learn
To frequency-modulate with silence
Shells in the display case
Open to codfish whispers
We salvage sunken harps
Along annular rings
Act Ⅶ: Chronicles of Bedroom Voyages
The teddy bear explores starlight in the duvet,
The teapot spout whispers mica fragments.
Butterfly curtains suddenly shake their scales,
Ironing midnight into translucent candy wrappers.
A goldfish flicks its tail through window glass,
Ventral fins churn the bedroom’s atmosphere.
It devours proverbs floating on pillows,
Each scale engraved with aquatic constellations.
When the moon begins shedding its fuzz,
We gather up feverish dreams,
Measuring warmth with eyelashes,
Burying spring’s anchor in linen folds.
Dreams are the innate poetic ore within each of us. We carve them with digital strokes and awaken them with words. Here, art and poetry converge and collide, generating unprecedented sensory experiences and spiritual dimensions. Welcome to this boundless dreamscape—find your own coordinates of dreaming between images and verses!
