Where Light Remembers: Product Designer Ruoyun Dai at San Francisco Art Fair 2026

By Elizabeth Harper

What does an image become when it begins to move like memory? What happens when design steps away from speed, utility, and instant legibility, and enters a slower terrain, one shaped by atmosphere, emotion, and the quiet intelligence of perception? In an age crowded with screens and endless visual output, these questions feel increasingly urgent. They also sit at the heart of Ruoyun Dai’s presentation at San Francisco Art Fair 2026, where technology appears less as a display of capability and more as a medium for reflection: a way of making feeling visible, of giving motion to stillness, of allowing images to unfold with the soft logic of a dream.

Held from April 16 to 19, 2026, at the Fort Mason Festival Pavilion, the fair brings together a wide spectrum of contemporary practices under the auspices of AMP. Within this setting, 2rt Studio presents a collaborative showcase at Booth F13, featuring Ruoyun Dai, Jiayue Li, and Murat Palta. Dai participates as Product Designer and Creative Director, and her presence shapes the exhibition with unusual force: of the 30 works exhibited, 25 are her own, giving the presentation a clear conceptual and emotional gravity. Previous editions of the fair drew more than 22,000 visitors, placing her work before a major public audience while situating it within one of the Bay Area’s most visible contemporary art platforms.

Dai’s work carries the imprint of an interdisciplinary life. She studied architecture as an undergraduate before earning an MFA in Design and Technology from Parsons School of Design, and that trajectory remains legible in the way she thinks. Space, structure, interface, narrative, and human behavior all continue to speak to one another in her practice. Her early training taught her to consider how people move through environments; her later work expanded that inquiry into digital and hybrid realms, where interaction itself becomes a material. Today, she describes her profession in terms of UX, UI, and product strategy, with a particular focus on AI, AR, and lenticular technology. What distinguishes her work is the way those technical domains arrive carrying mood, intimacy, and cultural texture.

That sensibility is vividly present in the works she brings to San Francisco. In the Shimmering Series, Dai uses JavaScript to transform images into pixel-based compositions with a continuous glimmer, designed specifically for lenticular display. The series centers on urban nightscapes, though “nightscape” scarcely captures the atmosphere of the work. These images seem to hover between city and apparition. Light flickers as though it has memory; buildings dissolve into vibration; the familiar geometry of the urban environment grows tender and unstable. A custom portal allows users to upload their own photographs and generate personalized works, introducing participation into the process and extending the piece beyond a fixed object. The result feels especially resonant for a product designer: the interface is not separate from the artwork’s meaning, but woven into it, becoming part of the experience of authorship, access, and emotional connection.

If Shimmering Series is attuned to the city, Lullaby Series turns inward. Combining Generative AI video technology with 56-frame lenticular prints, the work builds a visual field of slow transitions and subtle gradients. The colors shift with such delicacy that time itself seems to soften around them. There is a meditative quality here, a refusal of haste. The series does not chase impact through volume or spectacle. It trusts duration. It asks the viewer to stay, to breathe, to notice how small changes alter a whole atmosphere. In a visual culture shaped by speed and interruption, this kind of design feels almost radical. It suggests that contemporary technology can still be used in the service of quietness, care, and inward attention.

The most site-specific of the three, Unfolding SF Series, reflects Dai’s engagement with the city in which she now lives and works. Through 3D-textured AR prints of San Francisco landmarks, activated by NFC-triggered animations, the series explores the tension between the city’s accelerating identity as a center of tech and AI and the gradual fading of its human, cultural layers. Viewers tap the work with a phone, and hidden motion emerges. A static landmark becomes porous. A familiar urban symbol opens into something layered, uncertain, and alive. The gesture is small, yet its implications are expansive: cities are never only physical structures; they are also repositories of memory, contradiction, aspiration, and loss. Dai’s work captures that complexity with grace, giving digital interaction the depth of cultural observation.

This exhibition also extends concerns that have shaped Dai’s practice for years. During her graduate studies, she developed Dream Complex, an interactive AR installation focused on dream analysis and emotional mapping. The project explored how physical patterns, digital activation, and subconscious imagery could converge to create a new form of experiential storytelling. It was later recognized with the Red Dot Design Award and the MUSE Design Award Gold, among other honors. Those recognitions matter, yet what remains most compelling is the continuity of inquiry. Even now, Dai continues to return to the same deep territory: inner life, perception, and the possibility that technology might help people encounter themselves with greater clarity and sensitivity.

Her broader professional work reflects the same range. At New Port LLC, Dai serves as Product Designer/Creative Director, contributing to both digital product development and exhibition-based projects. Her background includes work on the DreamFace app, where she played a role in product design and growth strategy, as well as the development of 2rt Studio exhibitions that merge AI, AR, and lenticular formats into new modes of visual engagement. Across these contexts, one sees the same rare quality: a designer thinking beyond frictionless use and polished interface, toward experience as something layered, interpretive, and emotionally alive.

At San Francisco Art Fair 2026, Ruoyun Dai offers a vision of product design that feels unusually expansive. Design, in her hands, becomes a way of asking how people inhabit images, how emotion survives within systems, how technology might carry more than novelty. Her works shimmer, drift, and unfold; they invite touch, time, and contemplation. They understand that contemporary life is saturated with tools, and they answer with something more enduring: atmosphere, resonance, and the possibility of wonder. Long after the first glance, her images continue to move—through light, through memory, through the viewer’s own inward landscape.