Birth and Death

‘Birth and Death' is the first exhibition of ATISMIC's annual curatorial project – Black Humour of Mine , featuring LAN Chung Hsuan, Walking Grass Agriculture, Ho CHAN, HUANG Wei and CHANG Ming Yao.

As war has been a recurring theme in Lan Chung Hsuan’s artworks, ‘Let the So-called Bad Guys Pay the Price’ shows the artist’s focus on the soldiers’ body temperature before death, exploring how people don't want the warmth of life to disappear, but expect it to because of the Nazi identity of the characters.

‘Cosmic Fruits and Vegetables – When Mangos Giggle In Extreme Weather’ presented by Walking Grass Agriculture, an artist group best known for meditating on the agriculture industry and the ecological environment, points out some agricultural problems such as dependence on weather, exploitation by dealers and dumping of surplus, and further reflects upon how the crop may be reborn into NFTs.

Whilst Ho Chan re-imagines the definition of a straight line in terms of drawing technique in ‘Work In Progress’, the artist is also suggesting other possibilities for experiencing a life or looking at any linear progression.

By stacking and offsetting multiple layers in ‘Simulation-Sedimentary_frame’, Huang Wei has created images that are somewhere between natural and synthetic, and thereby discussing the authenticity and nature of existence of digital art.

Chang Ming Yao attempts to negotiate with the machine through text prompts to paint a series of 'Kusozu', demonstrating not only the corpse decomposition but ‘the extinction of the human form’, and the uncertainty in AI art has also made the work even more intriguing.

Whether the artist is working on a specific social issue, such as Lan Chung Hsuan or Walking Grass Agriculture, or delving into form variations caused by different techniques or technology, such as Ho Chan, Huang Wei or Chang Ming Yao, the core of ‘Birth and Death’ as an NFT art exhibition is never to emphasise the opposites like traditional finance vs DeFi, real world vs metaverse, physical artwork vs art NFTs.

The exhibition hopes to lead the audience to reconsider that the combination of NFT technology and art may not be an absolute black or white, nor is it a basis for judging whether an art NFT is a work of art or an investment commodity, but rather a category that may co-exist in the art world in the future.

[From 15 July to 14 October, the exhibition will be presented simultaneously on GOXR and CYBER. For information on acquiring artworks, please refer to the curation sector on akaSwap.]