Is Aaron Deng’s Pop Girl a Symptom or a Cure for Digital Alienation?

Multidisciplinary artist Chenguang Aaron Deng opens up about creating Lexie Liu’s “Pop Girl.”

BY SERENA HANZHI WANG July 25, 2025

I first met Chenguang Aaron Deng because we both worked at a pop culture creative agency called Travel Agency — a place known for helping brands reach Gen Z by making unhinged reels and surreal campaigns. I was the strategist there for a year; he later joined the art department with an aesthetic I can only describe as candy-coated dystopia — think of Tommy february6 if she grew up on QQ and After Effects. We had heard of each other before, but our first time meeting in person was at Dimes Square — a half-scene, half-joke place that somehow made the meeting feel inevitable, it felt more like a continuation than a beginning.

His mind still seemed to roam in neon nights half a world away. Deng is a visual director and multidisciplinary artist who splits his life between New York’s creative hustle and Shanghai’s futuristic glow. He's 25, holds a degree from Parsons School of Design — which sounds like the usual New Yorker’s script, but something about his work makes you pause. He cut his teeth in Shanghai’s music & fashion video scene before working in NYC — which, weirdly, is also how I started. When I was 19, I interned for 88 Rising and ended up producing their music videos. That was my first glimpse of the dream: edit timelines at 3am. I left it all behind. But Aaron didn’t. He kept going, and now he’s one of the best in the game. Since then, he has built a striking portfolio in graphic design, motion graphics, and surreal moving images by collaborating with alt-pop icons.

 Stills from 'Pop Girl"

For all his rambunctious acts in the scene, Deng is perhaps best known for his long-term collaboration with Chinese pop star Lexie Liu. He served as the visual director for her international tour, translating her music into arena-sized imagery. And in early 2025, Deng took their partnership to new heights by directing the music video for “Pop Girl,” Lexie Liu’s latest single that has everyone buzzing.

Lexie Liu is a phenomenon in her own right – a major pop star and voice of a new generation. She’s been described as “Chinese Blackpink” or “cyberpunk Faye Wong” by international media. I mean, I could apportionate these funny titles, but I really think she’s one of a kind — not copying anyone, just translating her own weirdness through the language of Music.

When Lexie released “Pop Girl” in March 2025, it quickly became a sensation. The official video soared past one million views within days of launch, flooding social feeds with its striking imagery and earworm chorus.

But “Pop Girl” isn’t an album or a typical single rollout – it’s a three-minute video artwork with layers of meaning. And at the helm of its creation was Deng, the visual director responsible for the video’s entire conceptual framework, production design, and storytelling. His role was essentially to translate Lexie’s sonic vision into a visual narrative, crafting a world for Pop Girl to inhabit. “I was a world-builder,” Deng notes. “Lexie gave me the song, and I dreamed up a universe for it.” 

So, what exactly is “Pop Girl”? On the surface, it’s a glossy music video for a catchy Y2K-inspired pop track. But Deng’s visual treatment reveals a deeper story – a meditation on identity, perfection, and the blurred line between the dream and the needs in the digital age. Pop Girl is Lexie Liu’s alter-ego, a hyper-real pop idol who lives in a candy-colored dream. Deng conceived the video as a surreal journey between two halves of one persona: the glamorous avatar projected to the world and the vulnerable self peering out from behind the screen.

I asked him, "what kind of truth can exist in a world that sort of loves 'uninspiring' perfection?” Deng explains. In the video’s opening, Lexie’s character — the Pop Girl — appears in all her manufactured glory. She’s clad in a sultry pink vinyl outfit, platinum-blonde hair slicked to plastic perfection, strutting on a massive CD platform under spotlight. 

In this dreamscape, mirrors multiply her image; at one point we see multiple Lexies dancing in unison on that giant CD, like a manufactured pop army (a cheeky nod to the “pop product” on a literal disc). The aesthetic is shiny, sexy, surreal – a throwback to turn-of-the-millennium pop glamour with a cyber-punk sheen. Deng bathes these scenes in neon pink and electric blue light, dialing up the gloss and allure to almost cartoonish levels. Pop Girl is performing confidence – “skin clear, hair shiny,” as the song’s lyrics go – and the camera worships her like a digital goddess.

Yet Deng wants to make something far more real. Between the performance scenes, we glimpse a different Lexie: a dark-haired girl in an intimate, cluttered bedroom, lit only by the pale glow of a laptop and the twitching of pixelated light. In one shot, she’s curled up on a bed hugging a plush toy rabbit, eyes lost in thought. In another, she sits on the floor in an oversized hoodie, scrolling her phone while technicolor shadows play across her face. These moments feel stolen from reality – achingly familiar to anyone who’s felt alone under the gaze of their screen. Pop Girl’s smile fades, replaced by the quiet anxiety of the girl behind the persona.

The video’s emotional climax comes when the two versions of Lexie finally meet. In a flickering pink twilight, the pop idol alter-ego steps off her pedestal and approaches the vulnerable real self. They regard each other for a moment – sparkly fake lashes versus natural face – and then fold into an embrace. It’s a brief, heart-tugging image: the glamorous, perfected self comforting the anxious true self. “I wanted that moment to feel like a reconciliation,” Deng says. “Like two halves of the same person finally saying, I see you.” In that hug, the video finds its soul. The alter-ego and the girl next door become one, if only for a moment, blurring the line between the Instagram-filtered life and the unvarnished truth. 

It’s ok, We all do the normie stuff, the lame stuff, or the too-muchness that doesn’t test well but maybe says more about who we are?

Visually and thematically, “Pop Girl” tackles the pressure to present a flawless digital image. Lexie’s lyrics talk about the “anxiety” and “pressure of crafting a perfect digital persona,” and Deng amplifies those themes on screen.

There’s a trace of early Signe Pierce in this work — not the chaos part of American Reflexxx, but the aftermath. The moment when the body’s still lit, still stylish, but no longer reacting. Also slight echoes of Lu Yang. She builds spiritual avatars through pop-theology nightmares. Aaron’s girl is smaller, more exposed—less divine, more local. She doesn’t ascend; she repeats. Because she promises us proximity to someone else’s attention

I think we Gen-Z learn too early to please—to optimize for likes, applause, relatability—do we ever really learn what we personally like? Or are we just curating ourselves for the algorithm, for others, for some imagined mirror of coolness? Maybe our cultural taste gets locked in during our teens not because it's the most authentic, but because it’s when we’re most susceptible to wanting to be loved.

With Pop Girl, Deng wanted to weave those contradictions into a poetic structure. The result is a video art piece that plays out like a fever dream: part music video, part art film, drenched in nostalgia and futuristic flair all at once. It feels intimate yet fantastical. Every frame is loaded with symbols – mirrors, screens, stage lights, and bedroom shadows – each chosen to blur the boundary between the glamorous fantasy and the raw emotion underneath.

Talking to Deng, I got to know more about myself and my peers. We talked less about the so-called 'creative process' and more about burnout, strange emotions, and performance hangovers. “I didn’t want to just make cool stuff for Lexie – I wanted to truly engage with our generation” he told me. “Gen-Z is almost impossible to entertain." We’ve seen too much, clicked too fast, memed everything to death. Even sincerity has to be packaged well, or else we scroll past it. Aaron knows that. That’s why his works move us not with drama but with the honest exhaustion — it paces like someone scrolling late at night, too tired to even cry. Every jump cut feels like muscle memory: perform, pose, glitch, pause. If you’ve ever posted something and immediately regretted it, or stared at your own face too long in selfie mode, you already know what this video is about.

As our conversation winds down, Deng reflects on what “Pop Girl” means in the bigger picture of his career. It’s more than just another director credit — he’s done those before. It’s a statement about the kind of work he wants to do. Now he becomes a visual storyteller with a distinct voice. Pop Girl “established my role as a narrative builder — a narrative I believe in — across multiple visual disciplines. I always knew I was capable of that.”WM.