Emotional Architectures: The Visual Language of Chenguang Deng

From the stage lights of New York to the soft grain of a fashion film in Shanghai, award winning visual artist Chenguang Deng, also known as Aaron, is quietly but decisively shaping a hybrid design language that resists categorization.  Deng is celebrated for navigating the tension between digital texture and emotional depth, between sleek commercial finish and subcultural echoes. As he puts it, he isn’t merely creating a style, but rather “a system in which image, sound, space, and tempo converse with one another.”

Chenguang Deng (Aaron)

Deng’s trajectory reflects the sensibility of a generation trained across media and geography. He began his career assisting on music video and fashion film sets in Shanghai, before joining the New York-based pop culture creative agency THE REAL TRAVEL AGENCY in 2023. Since then, he has contributed to album visuals for artists like Caroline Polachek and Vegyn via Studio Pending, while steadily refining his own conceptual approach.

His collaboration with Chinese pop artist Lexie Liu has become a defining chapter in this evolution. As visual director for Liu’s TOUR ’24, Deng led a cross-cultural team in developing the show’s full visual environment, creating a set that functioned not merely as backdrop, but as an “emotional architecture.” “Each track wasn’t treated as a separate scene. Instead, we constructed the set as a feedback loop that incorporated recurring motifs, mirrored movements, and subtle shifts in tone,” Deng explains.

This approach carried into his direction of Liu’s Pop Girl music video in 2025, a stylized, emotionally fragmented narrative that interrogates identity and performance. Rather than rely on fixed visual formulas, Deng builds adaptable systems that shift with context, placing greater emphasis on timing, spatial logic, and sensory tension rather than decorative flourish.

This responsiveness extends into his independent work. In 2024, he co-founded PULP, a self-described “magazine without pages” that uses editorial logic as a conceptual device. Instead of printed volumes, PULP releases episodic “collections” that blur the line between archive and invention. Objects like airline tickets, motel keys, and lookbooks become props—not for nostalgia, but to stage longing and ambient dislocation. Deng sees the project not as a re-creation of the past, but as a way to sample its lingering visual residues, which he refers to as emotional “afterimages.”

A recurring touchstone in PULP is early 2000s Asian pop culture—a period Deng experienced less as direct memory than as filtered mythology. Born in 1999, he encountered that era’s aesthetics—idol magazines, music show graphics, fan-made merch—primarily online, forming a visual vocabulary shaped by delay and distance. Rather than correct for this dissonance, he amplifies it, leaning into its sense of cultural aftershock.

Whether in client-facing projects or experimental releases, Deng’s practice maintains a productive tension between editorial strategy and subcultural drift. He approaches brand language as something malleable—an existing system that can be stretched, restructured, or subtly misused. “Even in commercial work, I treat the brand language as something to be stretched or misused,” Deng says. His goal is not overt rebellion, but to insert just enough friction to shift the viewer’s reading of the work.

It’s a meticulous and layered process, but one that’s already leaving an imprint. Deng’s work offers a template for how visual storytelling might evolve in an era saturated with images yet starved for atmosphere. His is not a practice of spectacle, but of accumulation. It is quietly radical in its refusal to settle and compelling in its commitment to the tension between things.

Author: ZIN