Subheadline: At the Museum of Modern Art’s Creativity Lab, an interactive installation invites visitors to explore artist books, surrealist imagination, and the creative possibilities of bringing images and words together.
NEW YORK — A book can hold a story, preserve an idea, or transport a reader into an imagined world. At The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), artist Chang Yuchen invites visitors to consider another possibility: a book can become a space to explore, rearrange, and create. Through Creativity Lab: Art of the Book, the museum transforms the familiar format of the printed page into an interactive environment shaped by imagination and participation.
On view through March 14, 2027, in the Paula and James Crown Creativity Lab on MoMA’s second floor, the project explores the book as both an artistic medium and a creative practice. Its central installation, In a Dream We Entered a Book, was developed in collaboration with Yuchen and encourages visitors to construct dream worlds by arranging familiar images, symbols, and objects across a page. <Cite refs={[“turn820184search0″,”turn820184search2”]}/>
Rather than positioning visitors solely as observers, the project makes them participants in the creative process. Drawing prompts, bookmaking workshops, and a resource library of artists’ books extend the experience beyond the installation itself, introducing different ways to understand how books can function as works of art.
Rethinking what a book can be
Books are usually associated with printed words, bound pages, and a linear reading experience. Artists, however, have long experimented with these conventions, transforming books into objects that can be handled, unfolded, rearranged, performed, or interpreted visually.
Creativity Lab: Art of the Book places this expanded understanding of the medium at the center of its approach. Words and images are treated as materials that can be brought together in unexpected ways. The page becomes a space for composition, while the act of arranging visual elements becomes a form of storytelling.
This approach changes the relationship between reading and making. Visitors are encouraged to explore how images can suggest narratives without relying on conventional sentences, how symbols can acquire new meanings when placed beside unfamiliar objects, and how a sequence of pages can create a world through visual association.
The project also opens the book to experimentation. Instead of assuming that every story must follow a fixed beginning, middle, and end, participants can explore connections, contrasts, and unexpected combinations. Meaning emerges through the act of making, rather than arriving as a finished message supplied by an author.
Entering a dream through art
The installation In a Dream We Entered a Book draws on the imaginative possibilities of dreams, where familiar objects can appear in unfamiliar contexts and ordinary logic gives way to surprising associations.
Visitors are invited to create their own dream worlds by arranging images, symbols, and objects across a page. This process encourages an approach to storytelling that is visual and associative. A single image may suggest a memory, a place, a feeling, or a fictional character; placed alongside another image, it can produce an entirely different interpretation.
The installation’s relationship with dream imagery also connects it to the broader history of Surrealism, an artistic and literary movement that explored the unconscious, unexpected juxtapositions, and alternative forms of reality. MoMA’s current presentation is explicitly inspired by its exhibition The Surrealist Book: Tomorrow Lives in Mirrors, which examines the role of artist books in Surrealist experimentation. <Cite refs={[“turn820184search0″,”turn820184search3”]}/>
That connection gives the Creativity Lab a historical dimension. The invitation to make a dream world is not simply an activity for its own sake; it introduces visitors to a tradition in which artists have used books to challenge conventional storytelling and explore the unpredictable relationships between language, image, and imagination.
Chang Yuchen’s interdisciplinary practice
Yuchen approaches art through multiple disciplines, including writing, drawing, teaching, and publishing. Her practice explores how different forms of communication can be translated into one another and how creative work can encourage exchange between people.
One of her ongoing projects, Coral Dictionary, is a writing system based on coral debris. Through visual, associative, and emotive translation, the project considers how meaning might emerge through forms other than conventional language. <Cite refs={[“turn820184search0″,”turn820184search6”]}/>
This interest in alternative systems of communication provides a useful context for understanding her contribution to Creativity Lab: Art of the Book. The installation invites visitors to experiment with the relationship between images and ideas, recognizing that a story does not always need to begin with written words.
Yuchen’s broader interdisciplinary approach also challenges rigid boundaries between artistic disciplines. Writing can become a visual process, drawing can operate as a form of translation, and publishing can create opportunities for ideas to circulate beyond the individual artist. Within the Creativity Lab, these possibilities become accessible through hands-on exploration.
A collaborative space for making
The program extends beyond the central installation through public activities developed with the Center for Book Arts, Dieu Donné, and Yuchen. These collaborations bring together different approaches to bookmaking, print-based practice, and artistic experimentation. <Cite refs={[“turn820184search0″,”turn820184search4”]}/>
Founded in 1974, the Center for Book Arts promotes education, preservation, exhibition, and active exploration of book-related artistic practices. Dieu Donné, established in 1976, supports contemporary artists through collaborative work with handmade paper. Their participation connects MoMA’s public program to specialist communities that have developed distinct ways of working with the book as an art object.
The workshops give participants opportunities to explore bookmaking as a process rather than simply encounter completed works. By working with materials, images, and sequences, visitors can discover how the physical structure of a book influences the way its contents are experienced.
This collaborative dimension is important to the project’s larger purpose. Artistic knowledge is not presented as something that belongs exclusively to professionals or institutions. Instead, visitors are invited to experiment, learn through making, and exchange ideas with others.
The Creativity Lab is designed for a broad audience, making it an accessible point of entry for people who may be unfamiliar with artists’ books or contemporary conceptual art.
MoMA’s Creativity Lab as a place for participation
The Paula and James Crown Creativity Lab provides a setting for projects that connect artworks and ideas with personal reflection, creative activity, and exchange among museum visitors. Its participatory format differs from the traditional gallery model, in which audiences primarily view objects selected and arranged by curators.
In Art of the Book, the visitor’s contribution is central. The installation offers prompts and materials, but participants determine how to combine them and what kinds of visual worlds to develop. The experience can therefore produce different results for different people, depending on their memories, interests, and imaginative choices.
The program also demonstrates how a museum can connect its exhibitions to creative practice. The relationship with The Surrealist Book: Tomorrow Lives in Mirrors offers historical context, while the hands-on activities allow visitors to test some of the broader possibilities associated with artists’ books.
Instead of treating art history as a fixed sequence of styles and movements, the Creativity Lab presents it as an ongoing source of questions and experiments. Visitors can encounter an idea in the museum and then explore what it might mean through their own creative work.
The future of storytelling begins on the page
Creativity Lab: Art of the Book ultimately invites visitors to reconsider a familiar object. A book need not be only a container for text; it can be a sculptural form, a visual language, a record of collaboration, or a space where unexpected stories emerge.
Through Yuchen’s In a Dream We Entered a Book, the museum turns these possibilities into an invitation to participate. Images become building blocks, symbols open new associations, and the page becomes a place where imagination can take shape.
For visitors to MoMA, the project offers an opportunity to engage with contemporary art by doing rather than simply looking. Its central idea is straightforward but expansive: stories can be constructed in many ways, and the act of making can be as important as the finished result.
On view through March 14, 2027, Creativity Lab: Art of the Book brings the artist’s book into a public, participatory setting, encouraging New Yorkers and museum visitors to discover how a page can become an entire world.
