When Chen Chuanduan (b. 1994) was a child, he often dreamt of the stars – traversing space, drifting through bubble universes, weightlessly floating towards celestial bodies. Yet, as he grew older, these visions faded – giving way to adult routines and reality. Now, with a camera in hand, he’s recapturing these lost memories through an extraordinary work of docu-fiction: the Everett’s Notes series.
This body of work is central to his latest solo exhibition at Fotografiska in Shanghai, The Tacit Measure: Caves, Comets, and Dreams Uncollapsed. Here, Chuanduan takes inspiration from physicist Hugh Everett, whose ideas gave rise to the concept of “multiverses.” This theory – of endless stages where all of life’s possibilities play out – feels complicated, but pop culture has embraced it in recent years. Films including the Academy Award-winning Everything Everywhere All at Once and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness have dived headfirst into stories of shifting timelines and doppelgängers. Similarly, each of Chuanduan’s frames feels like a portal into an alternate reality, where dreams and science intersect.
Chuanduan, meanwhile, employs Everett’s theory as a metaphor for the unconscious, asking: “When we dream, are we connected to another version of ourselves in a parallel universe?” It’s a big – perhaps unanswerable – question, yet one that has produced some striking imagery. Everett’s Notes is split into three sections, each representing the artist’s attempt “to rediscover the dreams of the cosmos [and] the fantasies of my childhood – imagining beings of immense scale, existing in the vastness of space.”
The first, The Meteor of the Blue Comet, originates from a vision of being “struck” by a meteorite. The Cave is an Eternal Night, meanwhile, documents a mysterious, otherworldly land – harbouring unnamed sounds and unexplained light. Then there’s Specimen 84003, which transforms his student-era experiences in planetary geological research into a visual poem, building a bridge between science and fantasy. The result is sure to spark the imagination. Photography-lovers might be reminded of Maria Lax’s Some Kind of Heavenly Fire, a similarly eerie collection centred around UFO sightings in remote Northern Finland.
In the description of Everett’s Notes, Chuanduan states: “I have lost the ability to dream of the universe.” Yet this show suggests something different. Viewers are thrown headfirst into “cosmic wonders that defy description”: beams of light crashing down from the sky, caves glowing red and blue. This is a show that considers imagination and humanity’s enduring fascination with the cosmos. As such, it creates an intriguing dialogue with Space, an exhibition of 13 photographers on view at Fotografiska’s sister location in Stockholm – whilst inviting audiences to reconnect with their own innate sense of childhood wonder.
The Tacit Measure: Caves, Comets, and Dreams Uncollapsed is at Fotografiska Shanghai until 11 January.
Words: Eleanor Sutherland
Image Credits:
1. The Town Where The Portal Appeared from the series Everett’s Notes, 2024 © Chen Chuanduan.
2. When The Comet Pierced Through Me from the series Everett’s Notes, 2024 © Chen Chuanduan.
3. They Dwell Here from the series Everett’s Notes, 2024 © Chen Chuanduan.
