As a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, in the early 1990s, she produced her first documentary, Inner Visions: Avant-Garde Art in China, a short video about Beijing artists in search of modernity. It premiered at the Hawaii International Film Festival and won a Bronze Apple at the National Educational Video and Film Festival. After a career in other fields, Lydia Chen returned to filmmaking to revisit her main subjects—the artists, Beijing, and changing society—25 years later. Art in Smog is her first feature documentary.