Japanese painter Moemi Yamamoto (b. 1985) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in 2022, where she studied in Josef Bolf’s studio. Since then she has continued living in Prague. Her exhibition in Cheb consists of a series of paintings that oscillate between the concrete and the imaginary, between (urban) reality and its dreamlike echo. The title of the exhibition, Dream within a Dream, refers to Edgar Allan Poe’s famous poem from 1849, in which the author asks whether “all we see or think we see is but a dream within a dream.” Yamamoto translates this dilemma into visual language — her paintings are not just a record of reality but a reflection of an inner world where memory, emotion, and time intertwine in the paradoxical logic of dreams. There is no temporal hierarchy in her paintings, and often no narrative coherence; seemingly separate events take place simultaneously, without any logical sequence. The figures that appear in them are mostly just wandering, observing, sometimes walking aimlessly across the space. Others are completely absorbed in themselves. They are more like participating witnesses than actors, similar to the viewer.