NFT Art
I was invited by Shanghai’s well-known metaverse technology and art company Cocafe to have my digital artworks participate in the prestigious Shanghai Jiahe Auction’s winter auction titled “Digital Symbiosis”: Blockchain-Digital Art” at the turn of 2021-2022. Two of my art pieces were selected, encrypted as NFTs, and auctioned (Sodom, Forest Fires of 2019, 2020), and there, I have officially become an NFT artist.
So how and why, an artist like myself, brought up in the traditional Chinese Calligraphy painting world, then focusing on western traditional oil paintings, would be involved in the NFT space, and how do I think of NFT arts? Like many people, I don’t know too much about the metaverse. I just see the metaverse as a new digital world that is waiting to be explored –much so like when Internet first started, and just like when the New World was first found. It is very new, has no proper rules yet, and everyone is just learning about it by trying different things. What’s happening in the space so far: some are good, some are risky, some are terribly dangerous and derogatory. It will take years before we really know what we are doing and where it’s taking us.
According to Wikipedia, A non-fungible token (NFT) is “a unique and non-interchangeable unit of data stored on a blockchain, a form of digital ledger. NFTs can be associated with reproducible digital files such as photos, videos, and audio. NFTs use a digital ledger to provide a public certificate of authenticity or proof of ownership, but do not restrict the sharing or copying of the underlying digital files. The lack of interchangeability (fungibility) distinguishes NFTs from blockchain cryptocurrencies.” So having the NFT technology on a digital artwork can provide a clear source of identity and security to the value of the artwork in the metaverse.
Participating in this auction was an eye-opening experience for me. First of all, it pushed me to think harder what this new digital age means to the world and to me and why the word “metaverse” is a new word I need to learn. Secondly, the NFT auction was part of Shanghai Jiahe Auction’s winter auction, which totaled over 3000 pieces of artworks from the 1500’s till today. So going to the preview and seeing all the auctioned items provided me the opportunity to see a whole range of premium artifacts from a time span of close to 1000 years. It got me thinking really hard about the identity and meaning of art, artifacts, handicrafts; their evolutions, trends, and meanings to different cultures and times. There was no one right or wrong answer. Only time could tell where our collective species is taking us and what our own works today will mean to our society in the long run.
Photos by Irene Chang Studio
