News
May 2026
Research-driven
VR work Trans-composition has received the FIVARS Award for Excellence
in Visual Design (Canada). Trans-composition is an immersive work
developed through creative practice and artistic research by immersive
director and artistic researcher Shiuan Yan. It explores how perception,
spatial relations, and temporality shape the unfolding of immersive
experience, creating conditions through which meaning may gradually
emerge.
The award recognizes one of the project's central inquiries:
how visual and spatial design shape the ways experience unfolds through
perception, movement, and temporality.
This recognition represents an important milestone in the ongoing development of the studio's research trajectory. It further validates questions that continue to inform the Perceptual–Temporal Framework and its development through creative practice, comparative analysis, and international dialogue.
— Research Milestone
First Public Articulation of the Perceptual–Temporal Framework
Aprl 2026
After several years of practice-based research, theoretical inquiry, comparative case analysis, and international dialogue, Shiuan Yan Studio, founded by immersive director and artistic researcher Shiuan Yan (晏萱), presents the first public articulation of the Perceptual–Temporal Framework.
The Perceptual–Temporal Framework is an evolving methodological framework for understanding and analyzing how immersive experiences take shape and unfold. It investigates how immersive experiences take shape through perceptual conditions, embodied relations, and temporal unfolding, and how these experiential dynamics may support shifts in understanding and the emergence of meaning. This publication marks a significant stage in the development of the Perceptual–Temporal Framework, bringing an evolving body of research together into its first coherent methodological articulation. Grounded in phenomenology, East Asian aesthetic philosophy, and artistic research, it establishes a foundation for continued development through creative practice, comparative case analysis, interdisciplinary dialogue, and international collaboration.
→ Theoretical Grounding full article
— Research Development |
Reframing Immersive Experience
How Meaning Emerges in Immersion: Series Introduction
Aprl 2026
Amid the rapid development of immersive content, this article identifies a recurring pattern: despite growing technical sophistication and strong conceptual intent, many works struggle to sustain experiential coherence over time. Experiences often lose continuity rather than develop further. In response, the article proposes a structural perspective to re-examine how immersive experiences take shape, unfold, and sometimes break down. Instead of evaluating works mainly through content, immersion, or interaction, it identifies recurring structural tendencies: the separation between concept and experience, unstructured perceptual intensity, non-transformative interaction, and narratives that remain unembodied. By reframing these patterns, the article establishes a methodological foundation for case analyses and offers new perspectives for understanding, analyzing, andevaluating immersive works.
— International Evaluation Experience Informing the Research Framework
Mar 2026
Evaluation experience offers a comparative perspective across diverse practices, informing the refinement of the Perceptual–Temporal Framework and reinforcing the link between theory and practice.
— Research Development |
Meaning Generation in Immersive Experience
Toward the Perceptual–Temporal Framework — The Temporal Unfolding of Experience
Feb 2026
Building on years of immersive creative practice and theoretical inquiry, this publication marks an important milestone in the research that later developed into the Perceptual–Temporal Framework. It extends research beyond conventional narrative concerns to examine how immersive experiences gradually take shape through perception, relations, and temporality, and how understanding and meaning develop throughout lived experience. Grounded in phenomenology and East Asian aesthetic philosophy, the essay proposes a research perspective centered on lived perceptual experience. It examines how shifts in spatial relations, rhythmic calibration, embodied reorientation, and temporal unfolding create the conditions for immersive experience to develop, thereby supporting transformative understanding and the gradual emergence of meaning. This publication marks an important transition from theoretical inquiry to methodological development, laying the conceptual foundation for what later became the Perceptual–Temporal Framework.
— Research Milestone |
Eastern Aesthetics Beyond Form: Emptiness and Pause in an Accelerated World
Feb 2026
This essay represents a transition in the studio's immersive practice toward explicit theoretical articulation.
Reflections developed over years of experimentation are systematically organized and articulated in this essay. Instead of treating East Asian ink aesthetics merely as a stylistic reference, often limited to dispersed perspective and shifting viewpoints, this analysis re-engages with its foundational structural logic. It focuses on relational fields of vision, spatial dispersion, and temporal openness, examined in relation to phenomenological accounts of lived experience.
In the context of accelerated contemporary conditions, emptiness and pause are re-examined as mechanisms for perceptual recalibration. They enable time to be perceived as both progression and layered unfolding. This publication formalizes a longstanding line of inquiry and establishes the conceptual foundation for future structural modeling.
2026
Engagement with International Evaluation Contexts
Participation in professional evaluation processes in the international XR and immersive field extended the ongoing inquiry into experiential structures to include the assessment of diverse immersive works.
22026
System Consolidation & Ongoing Validation
The perceptual framework enters a phase of consolidation, with new works extending and testing its structural coherence.
— Professional Presentation | SIGGRAPH Asia XR 2025
Dec 2025
Research-driven VR work Trans-composition
was selected for the 2025 SIGGRAPH Asia XR program and presented as a
creative research case study within the conference.
The presentation
extended beyond the work itself, articulating how the research framework
materializes within immersive space. It focused on three key
dimensions.
— The modulation of spatial scale, rhythmic calibration, and calibrated pause as mechanisms through which meaning gradually emerges across temporal layers;
— The understanding of interaction as a relational field, where embodied positioning and spatial return function as generative conditions.
This presentation marked a moment in which theoretical grounding and structural modeling entered international discourse, allowing the perceptual framework to be examined within a broader cross-cultural context.
The Ji.hlava Documentary Film Festival jury gave the VR work Trans-composition the following statement: "We particularly enjoyed the interplay of light and shadow and its deep connection to the author's culture and its symbolic underpinnings. The ties to idealized and rarefied personal memories that become, in turn, universal. The intricacies of an architecture that mirrors the intricacies of the self. And the narrator's voice that guides you throughout on a journey of amazement and wonder."
— Everything We Saw At NewImages Festival 2025 — UploadVR
April 2025
"An experience that aims to poetically explore the idea of transformation. Inspired by Go and Chinese philosophical thought, it's an intriguing surrealist journey of self reflection that dives into the cycle of reincarnation and the soul."
— Taiwanese director Shiuan Yan wins award at NewImages Festival 2025. — TAIWAN INFO.
April 2025
— Trans-composition Receives the Interactivity Prize at the NewImages Festival, France ! — Taiwan Creative Content Agency.
— Celebrating the laureates creators at NewImages Festival 2025. — NewImages
Festival.
April 2025
"Trans-Composition, by Research-driven immersive creator Shiuan Yan (晏萱), was recognized with the Interactivity Prize for its meditative and philosophically rich interface. Rooted in Chinese spiritual traditions, it crafts a surreal and contemplative journey through cycles of transformation. — NewImages Festival Jury"
2025
Recognition & System Maturation
Research-informed artistic works received sustained international recognition, including multiple awards.
The practice was acknowledged across artistic articulation, interactive structure, and theoretical formulation.
— LAFA Winners: Trans-composition has received the Best Visual Reality Award.— Los Angeles Film Awards.
Dec 2024
— Official Selection- Celebrating 10 years. — Festival of International Virtual and Augmented Reality Stories (FIVARS).
2024
Recognition & Structural Convergence
Creation and research converged to articulate structural affinities between phenomenology and East Asian aesthetic philosophy.
Cross-cultural aesthetic systems were examined not as stylistic references but as layered structural mechanisms capable of being translated into immersive spatial form.
The consolidation of a more coherent perceptual framework.
2023
Embodied Temporality
The inquiry deepened into phenomenological embodiment and entered into
dialogue with East Asian aesthetic philosophy, examining temporal
articulation and spatial interval within immersive environments.
Perception was increasingly approached as modulation, a calibrated adjustment of experiential density.
2020–2022
Perceptual Reorientation
Early immersive practices, informed by surrealism, semiotics, and phenomenological embodiment, began to reposition perception as a relational spatial condition rather than a fixed viewpoint.
This phase initiated a gradual shift toward understanding interaction as structural .
