It’s a language—one that talks about memory, identity, and the need to mean and belong, says Mohit Mishra from Mumbai.
With infinite scrolling, AI and virtual hyper-speed as a part of our daily lives, an interesting phenomenon has cropped up in the hearts and screens of Gen Zs: a vivid, cinematic nostalgia for a past they never truly experienced. This fixation is not quite, it glows. From the glitchy VHS tapes and pixelated video games to the cyberpunk colour schemes and Y2K fashion, a cultural current of neon nostalgia is washing through art, music, fashion, and internet life. It is loud, bright, and unexpectedly emotional.
This is not a trend. It is a language—one that talks about memory, identity, and the abiding need to mean and belong in a future that is sometimes unfamiliar. Neon nostalgia is not the Golden Age Fallacy that the movie Midnight in Paris deals with—while neon nostalgia reimagines the past through vibrant colour and digital remix to process present anxieties, the golden Age fallacy clings to an idealized, untouchable past—where one escapes reality rather than creatively engaging with it.
The Glow of the Familiar Future
Why are the current youngest generation—born during the era of smartphones and cloud computing—so enamored with 90s arcades, analog televisions, and early internet visual aesthetic? The explanation lies at the crossroads of culture and psychology. Neon nostalgia provides something precious in this era of hyper-speed and digitality: aesthetic comfort. Amidst the drowning excess of ultra-HD perfection and algorithmic coldness, the fuzzy blur of CRT screens or the warm glow of lava lamps seems human, imperfect, and tangible.
This visual comfort is amplified in times of shared uncertainty. Post-pandemic, in the era of climate angst, economic uncertainty, and social disillusionment, Gen Z is drawn to a bygone era when things were simpler, albeit only in fantasy. They are not nostalgic for the past as such, but for the sense of it: the way things appeared when they were slower, messier, and more material.
How Art is Reframing Nostalgia
Before neon became the language of Gen Z’s nostalgic rebellion, artists like Dan Flavin and Bruce Nauman pioneered its use in conceptual and minimal installations—transforming cold industrial light into poetic, psychological, and spatial experiences. Today, artists everywhere are greeting this feeling in bold forms. Consider Osheen Siva, for example—an Indian visual artist whose murals and digital paintings reenvision South Indian mythology in neon-punk sci-fi realms. Her murals and digital paintings combine feminine strength, Tamil culture, Dalit identity, and speculative futurism with hues that appear to radiate from within the canvas. By mixing cultural memory and hyper-modern visual language, Siva produces a world that is at once ancient and futuristic, addressing a generation suspended between roots and algorithms.
Internationally, artists such as Felipe Pantone are creating a buzz with glitchy, kinetic installations that look like living screens. His gradient-tinted works recall arcade cabinets and crashing software—a conscious celebration of digital fault. Pantone’s works tend to be reminiscent of snapshots on the fly of a speeding cyberspace highway: geometric, electric, and hypnotic. The nostalgia in his work is not about old machines, but about the speed at which culture, color, and information used to move, and the way that velocity now haunts our stillness.
Similarly, Indian graphic artist Yash Pradhan taps into subcontinental memory by remixing 90s Bollywood visuals, Windows 98 user interfaces, and lo-fi fonts. His artworks look like digital postcards from a parallel timeline—one where memory is saved not in cloud servers but in scratched CDs and old hard drives. Through his Instagram-fueled retro revival, Pradhan turns nostalgia into playful commentary on how India embraced the digital age.
TikToks, Tape Decks, and Internet Aesthetics
Neon nostalgia is not just confined to art. It is also flourishing in the texture of everyday digital life—from TikTok and Instagram videos which edit 90s Bollywood sequences to synth-pop soundtracks and Dreampunk, to Instagram mood boards packed with pixel art, vaporwave posters, and mock-VHS filters. The emergence of aesthetics such as Kidcore, Y2Kcore, Dreamcore, and Cybercore shows how visual storytelling has turned into an emotional journal for Gen Z. Each aesthetic provides a safe space, a means of feeling something intensely, even if that something is not real.
The resurgence of cassette tapes, disposable (instant) cameras, and flip phones among young artists is telling they’re not mere accessories— they are emotional signposts. They represent slowness, closeness, and texture in a culture that is often moving too quickly to grasp. Neon nostalgia is a subversive rebellion against the sterile precision of contemporary life. It is a manner of declaring: “I want to feel something real, even if I must recreate it from memory I never had.”
A Sociology of Time and Memory
Sociologically, this movement for aesthetics informs us that memory is no longer linear. Time itself has become blurred for Gen Z through the internet (hence seen in their blurry, grainy photos). Everything from the 70s or early 2000s is accessible, remixable, and editable on the same platform. And they are even taking inspiration and mixing the Gothic, the Victorian and the Romantic aesthetics and making a new internet aesthetics called Dark Academia. It often involves themes of mystery, intellectualism, and a sense of longing for a bygone era of scholarship.
The past is not something we are behind. It’s been flattened into a digital archive we scroll through every day, where popular culture like trendy Reels and old Coca-Cola commercials exist side-by-side with ancient mythologies. Artists are reacting to this flattening of time by collapsing timelines in their artwork. They combine old mythology with 90s cartoons or vintage fashion with futuristic tech to produce post-temporal aesthetics. Neon nostalgia, in a way, is not retrograde. It’s collapsing timelines to envision a world where the past and future intersect in color and paradox.
Past Forward: Looking Back to See Ahead
Finally, neon nostalgia is a mirror: it reflects on us who we are by showing us what we yearn for—even though we never even had it. It’s longing for something lost in the din: beauty, slowness, texture, ritual, light. And it’s no wonder this longing is finding expression so brightly in a generation that exists online, stages identity through pixels, and moves more emotional weight than ever before. For Gen Z, neon nostalgia is not a step back—it is an artistic reboot. It turns memory into media, sadness into style, and yearning into glow. It informs us that we are not merely fixated on the past—we are attempting to reconcile with the now by painting it even more vividly with all we ever loved, dreamed of, or required. As artists Osheen Siva, Felipe Pantone, and Yash Pradhan illustrate, the past is not lost—it’s radiating.
