CREDITS
Yao Jui-Chung
Christopher Adams
Sophie Chiang
Wang Weiyuan
This is the genesis of Yao Jui-Chung’s venture into crypto art. His solo exhibition at Tina Keng Gallery titled Invidia (the deadly sin of Envy) charts a journey through history, myth, and memory. A detour through wealth, fortune, and idolatry is worth the price of admission. Yao’s major works with pen and ink on paper draw from classical paintings and Internet imagery, where Buddhist deities and mythological crea-tures mingle with hackers and UFOs. The series presented here extend Yao’s mix of high- and low-brow folk customs and modern memes into the novel medium of NFTs.
The video performance Moon–Block–Chain(2023) documents Yao’s crypto-currency ini-tiation. The artist visited Hongludi Temple, a popular place of worship for wealth wishing in the mountains above Taipei, where he used a pair of moon blocks to pray for the private key to a crypto-currency wallet. This technique is described in detail in the accompanying Divina-tion Guide.
There is a connection here between religion and mathematics. By the 18th century, Leibniz had analyzed the hexagrams of the I Ching as binary numerals. Moon blocks operate like a digital logic gate, only yielding a successful an-swer if the two blocks land with opposite sides up. Both divination and cryptography rely on the universe as a source of randomness, but differ by crediting fate or physics. Praying for wealth is as familiar to temple supplicants as it is to crypto-currency speculators.
The video performance is flanked by por-traits of Twelve Disciples (2023) drawn from Yao’s extensive iconography. The artist has re-positioned the hierarchy of beings from his cosmology in a ”meta-verse” of twelve ech-elons: Aliens, Gods, Saints, Immortals, A.I., Mutants, Humans, Fairies, Demons, Ghosts, Beasts, and Legendary Creatures. These dis-ciples have assumed identities as voguish on-line avatars, mimicking popular PFP (profile-picture) projects like CryptoPunks and Bored Apes.
Perched at the entrance to the space is YAO COIN (2023), imitation money like the numis-matic charms found in temples, called mother coins or seed coins. This currency represents the ”tokenization” of the artist’s spiritual and monetary worth. They can be exchanged for a small donation.
ALTAR SPACE by Yao Jui-Chung co-locates trust in science, belief in markets, and faith in the divine: worshiping gods of wealth and ”moon-ing” crypto-currency, maintaining a skeptical and cynical spirit, and reincarnating high- and low-culture as crypto art.
Cross Disciplinary
2023
Cross Disciplinary
2023
Cross Disciplinary
2023
Cross Disciplinary
2023
Cross Disciplinary
2023
Cross Disciplinary
2023
Cross Disciplinary
2023
Cross Disciplinary
2023
Cross Disciplinary
2023
Cross Disciplinary
2023
Cross Disciplinary
2023
Cross Disciplinary
2023
Video-picture
雙頻錄像作品
2-channel video
2023
Video-picture
2-channel video
2023
Installation
12 prints, custom frames
2023
Installation
12 prints, custom frames
2023
Installation
12 prints, custom frames
2023
Installation
12 prints, custom frames
2023
Installation
12 prints, custom frames
2023
Installation
12 prints, custom frames
2023
Installation
12 prints, custom frames
2023
Installation
12 prints, custom frames
2023
Installation
12 prints, custom frames
2023
Installation
12 prints, custom frames
2023
Installation
12 prints, custom frames
2023
Installation
12 prints, custom frames
2023
Cross Disciplinary
Mixed media
2023