Yuchen Han of Manhattan on Life, Lessons & Legacy

We’re looking forward to introducing you to Yuchen Han. Check out our conversation below.

Yuchen, so good to connect and we’re excited to share your story and insights with our audience. There’s a ton to learn from your story, but let’s start with a warm up before we get into the heart of the interview. What is something outside of work that is bringing you joy lately?
Lately, I’ve found a lot of joy in meditation. It’s become a space where I can momentarily step outside of the noise of the world and feel a deep connection—with the universe, with myself, and with something beyond thought. There’s a kind of stillness that’s not passive, but powerful. It’s not about escaping—it’s about remembering. In those moments, joy feels less like a feeling and more like a state of truth.

Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what makes you or your brand unique?
My name is Yuchen Han. I’m a fashion designer, storyteller, and energetic systems builder—born in Xining, China, and currently based between New York and Shanghai. I’m the founder of ALIENANT, a fashion brand and cultural platform rooted in the mission of spiritual awakening, collective healing, and post-material transformation.

ALIENANT was born not out of commercial ambition, but survival. It emerged in 2019 at the darkest point in my life, during a four-year depression after moving to New York. At its core is a recurring childhood dream: a tiny alien ant carrying a mountain-sized grain of rice through endless white fog. That image became my personal myth. The “alien” symbolizes higher-dimensional awareness; the “ant” represents the burdened human spirit in a collapsing world. This duality defines my work—fusing futuristic silhouettes with emotional storytelling, digital experimentation with deep symbolic codes.

We don’t just create clothing—we create emotional armor, energetic portals, and wearable systems of remembrance. Our design philosophy blends glitch aesthetics, Taoist minimalism, modular construction, and soul technology. Every collection is a transmission. Every piece, a ritual.

Right now, we’re preparing to launch A Glimpse of Spiritual Awakening, a collection that took nearly two years to develop. It’s built around five core questions—Who am I? What is the truth of this world? Why am I here? Where am I going? How should I act?—and maps the journey from ego and illusion toward higher self and conscious action. The pieces are not just about silhouette—they’re about shifting perception. Awakening is no longer optional—it’s the evolutionary threshold of our time.

In an era defined by anxiety, distraction, and disconnection, I believe design must move beyond identity and into soul. ALIENANT isn’t a brand. It’s a cultural nervous system for the next chapter of Earth. And we’re just getting started.

Okay, so here’s a deep one: What’s a moment that really shaped how you see the world?
At the end of 2023, I experienced a major shift that redefined my entire worldview. After battling four years of depression, I began healing through reading, training, and daily meditation. Books like The Power of Now and Conversations with God opened a door I didn’t expect: a spiritual awakening.

That awakening didn’t just help me recover, it changed how I saw everything: The universe, the systems of power, religion, money, time, even the way humans think and suffer. I realized my entire life, my trauma, my depression, my childhood visions, was designed to lead me here.

That’s when all the pieces clicked. The recurring dream from my childhood—an alien ant carrying a giant grain of rice through mist. The ant was never just me; it symbolized humanity itself. Struggling under the burden of survival, power, and material desire. The fog was the illusion of the world—distraction, distortion, and unconsciousness.
And ALIENANT was never just a brand. It was the mission. My mission is to infuse the “ant” with “alien” consciousness—to awaken those trapped in systems of fear, control, and ego. That moment of awakening, when one sees through the illusion and remembers who they truly are, that is the ALIENANT moment.

I realized I am a Starseed, a Lightworker, and I came here to use fashion as a tool to help people awaken. This world is undergoing a massive energetic shift—Earth Ascension, but most people haven’t recognized it yet.

Through my work, I answer five core questions: Who am I? Where am I from? Why am I here? Where am I going? How should I act?

My brand isn’t about trends or sales. It’s a system. A system to guide people from illusion to truth, from ego to higher self. That moment shaped everything I do now.

When did you stop hiding your pain and start using it as power?
It started when I was a child, growing up under domestic violence. That environment left me deeply insecure and ashamed. I didn’t know how to express my feelings—I just wanted to disappear. But when I discovered Lady Gaga, something shifted. Her music and fashion showed me a new kind of power: the power to be seen, to express, to transform. From that moment on, I dreamed of creating a brand that could do the same, use fashion to empower those who have suffered in silence.

That vision became ALIENANT. Since then, I’ve been reversing my pain into energy and creation. My childhood trauma became the foundation of my first collections, not just to express my story, but to highlight the social issue of domestic violence. Later series like One Second Before Awakening and Destroy & Restructure explored the depths of depression and the critical moment before rebirth. They weren’t just about darkness, but about the beauty of breaking through it. Even our signature Glitch Art embodies this philosophy, celebrating flaws, errors, and distortion as sources of strength and individuality.

But it wasn’t until my spiritual awakening that I fully understood: all pain was never a curse, but a gift. I came to see that no one in this world is truly a victim, and no one is truly a perpetrator, these are roles we play within the cosmic balance of yin and yang. Everything that hurt me was part of a larger design to awaken me. Today, I no longer design from a place of self-protection or avoidance. I create from a place of awareness. We don’t run from pain, we embrace it. Because within it lies the very power we came here to reclaim.

Alright, so if you are open to it, let’s explore some philosophical questions that touch on your values and worldview. Where are smart people getting it totally wrong today?
Most people, including the smartest, are getting the entire foundation of reality wrong. We’ve been raised to believe in a world built on separation, fear, and external validation. We live trapped in the mind, obsessing over the past or the future, yet both only ever arrive in the form of now. And so we miss the present, which is the only place life actually happens.

We’ve been told “I think, therefore I am.” But the truth is closer to “I think, therefore I caged.” That belief made us identify with our thoughts and live inside our heads. But we are not our minds. Thinking is not something we consciously do. It’s something that happens within us. We are the observer, the awareness, the presence underneath it all. And what we’re truly looking for is not out there in status, approval, or material gain. It’s inside. The most precious gift is already within us—our peace, our clarity, and our connection to the higher self.

The old world taught us to act out of fear. We fear not having enough money, so we force ourselves to work in ways that drain us. We fear being unloved, so we compromise who we are to be accepted. We fear being left behind, so we stay in a constant state of anxiety. But the new world isn’t built on fear. In the new world, we do things because we genuinely love them. We create because it brings us joy. We speak our truth because it feels aligned. Our actions come from a place of inner freedom, not external pressure.

And perhaps the biggest misunderstanding is the belief that there are “others.” But the truth is, there is no one else. We are all different expressions of the same source. Every person we meet is another version of us. We came into this life to forget, to experience duality, to feel the push and pull of yin and yang, and then—one day—to remember. To remember that we are all connected. That we are all part of the same divine whole.

And when that remembrance happens, you see the beauty of everything. You look at this world like a living painting. And you cry, not because you’re broken, but because it’s all so beautiful. You finally remember who you are.

Before we go, we’d love to hear your thoughts on some longer-run, legacy type questions. Are you doing what you were born to do—or what you were told to do?
I used to follow what I was told. I studied hard, got into top schools, moved to New York, pursued my MFA, and tried to build a life that looked right from the outside. But inside, I was completely disconnected. I fell into four years of depression. That collapse forced me to stop everything and ask what this world is really made of, and why I felt so out of place in it.

Through that breakdown, I began a process of spiritual awakening. I started to see that this world isn’t built on truth. It runs on fear, disconnection, performance, and survival. People are not living — they are reacting. And I was one of them.

In that process, I remembered who I am. I am a Starseed. A soul that came here not to adapt, but to activate. This also explains why, even as a child, I always felt like I didn’t belong on Earth. I used to stare at the sky and hope someone would come take me home. Now I understand — I came here not to escape the system, but to help rebuild it.

That’s why I created ALIENANT. Not just as a fashion brand, but as a spiritual technology. We started with the Wearable Defense Mechanism, designing clothing that helped people survive, protect, and express themselves in a collapsing world. But now, we are building something bigger — an Awakening System. A full-body, full-soul design system to help people remember who they are, why they are here, and what they came to do.

Every piece I create carries a frequency. Every collection is part of a larger transmission. This is not fashion as identity. This is fashion as memory, as mirror, as map.

So no, I’m not doing what I was told to do. I’m doing what I came here to remember.
And now that I’ve remembered — everything else is just part of the mission.

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