Twin artists reimagine childhood: The story behind Chenyi Luo’s dollhouse dreams
The little worlds built in childhood might have been a cardboard castle, a blanket fort or a doll’s house. Whatever form they took, they remain among the warmest of memories. For many, such spaces live on as fragments of a personal, inner landscape. In Dollhouse Dreams, an award-winning illustration series, artist Chenyi Luo brings that world vividly back to life. Rarer still, she created it alongside someone who understood it as deeply as she did – her twin sister.
The project began as a deeply personal exploration of the twins’ shared childhood, transforming their closeness into a visual narrative. According to Luo, each piece imagines not only the childhood experienced but also the one once wished for. Set within a dreamlike doll’s house, the series explores intimacy, symmetry and narrative layering, blurring the lines between memory and fantasy. This emotional richness, combined with technical execution, has earned Dollhouse Dreams accolades from institutions including Creative Quarterly, American Art Awards, American Illustration & American Photography 44 Annual and Applied Arts. One work from the series was also shortlisted by Communication Arts, affirming its impact within the global illustration community.
What makes Dollhouse Dreams stand out – beyond its narrative – is the method of its creation. At GuessWho Studio, the collaborative platform founded by the Luo sisters, ideas are born jointly and developed in tandem. Chenyi Luo and her sister brainstorm, sketch, and refine concepts together before dividing tasks: one focuses on linework, the other on colour and texture. “There’s something incredibly powerful about two minds working in sync,” Luo notes. “While we often think alike, we still surprise each other. That keeps our work fresh.”
This unique collaboration is only one aspect of Chenyi Luo’s expanding creative career. Having graduated from Pratt Institute in New York with a BFA in Communications Design, Chenyi is already establishing herself as a designer whose range spans illustration, UI/UX, branding, and visual storytelling.
At What3ver, a New York-based company, Chenyi Luo plays a dual role as UI/UX designer and brand strategist. She helped build the company’s entire visual identity from the ground up – leading logo ideation, developing brand tone, and setting comprehensive typography and colour guidelines. She has also tackled user experience challenges, including redesigning the site’s signup flow, a project that required balancing aesthetics with seamless user interaction.
Her commercial portfolio further includes collaborations with Web3 platform Ink Finance, where she created social media visuals that drove high engagement across user communities, and Dongyi Dunhuang Hotel & Resorts, for which she designed festival-themed posters that fused traditional motifs with modern composition.
Chenyi Luo’s artistic curiosity also stretches into adjacent disciplines like music and performance. In past projects, she has designed concert posters, visual identities for theatre collectives, and stage visuals that intersect with narrative and rhythm. “Graphic design, music, and performance are different languages for expressing emotion,” she explains. “They inspire and inform each other. It’s a dialogue.”
Despite her versatility across mediums, Chenyi Luo remains rooted in her belief that “design shapes lives.” To her, good design is not just about aesthetics, but making everyday experiences more intuitive, empathetic, and human. This philosophy extends to her cultural approach. Growing up between China and the U.S., she often integrates the poetic sensibility of Eastern visual language with the structural clarity of Western design. The result is a body of work that feels both emotionally resonant and compositionally rigorous.
Looking ahead, Chenyi Luo is committed to nurturing both sides of her practice – continuing her solo growth while building new collaborative works through GuessWho Studio. One such upcoming project is Nanameimei, a new illustration IP that reflects the sisters’ evolving voice as twin artists and further explores themes of duality, imagination, and identity.
In a fast-paced creative economy where young talents often chase trends, Chenyi Luo offers something different: thoughtful work with emotional depth, technical clarity, and collaborative soul. Whether she’s designing brand systems, illustrating childhood dreamscapes, or building new worlds with her sister, Chenyi Luo’s work continues to offer something rare: a space to reflect, to feel, and to remember.
The editorial unit
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