Artists in the age of NFTs: Mitchell F. Chan
This article is part of my first written assignment for the Executive Masters in Art Market Studies 202 in the University of Zurich and eventually will be incorporated in my final thesis. Writing about digital artists was born out of arguments with lecturers (not going to name any names) and the need to shed light on artists whose work escapes the narrow confines of the majority of NFT criticism.
The fourth and last (but not least) artist to release is Mitchell F. Chan (see first, second, third). While MFC is not the first artist to create games as art, his games were the first to introduce the concept to me (I am admittedly and unapologetically a newbie of all sorts). I was fascinated by the idea of playing games engineered mainly to make me think and found both TBOS and WHCC very inspiring, to the point I want to start learning Unity to create my own!
Mitchell F. Chan is a conceptual artist born in 1982 in Canada, currently based in Toronto. He has been involved in the art world with new media installations and exhibitions across North America since 2006. Something Something National Conversation (In 2 Characters or Less) was his first solo exhibition in 2016 at the Angel Gallery in Toronto. Exhibited was a large-scale installation where two clouds of water vapor emerged from holes in opposite walls, floated toward each other, collided and eventually dissipated into nothingness, probing a “sense of powerlessness and puzzlement over the state of our current public discourse.” This was one month after Donald Trump had been elected as the President of the US.
Digital Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility in 2017 is a significant milestone in the artist’s career, not only for being one of the earliest NFT artworks to be exhibited and minted in a traditional art gallery (InterAccess in Toronto), but also for exploring how NFTs could advance the concept of separating the commodity form of an artwork from the experienced form.
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Digital Zones is an ode to French avant-garde artist Yves Klein's 1962 artwork, Zone de sensibilité picturale immatérielle. Klein sold fresh air for 14 gold ingots. His collectors would receive a receipt and be asked to burn it, then Klein would throw half the gold into the Seine and keep the other half. With this ritual Klein wanted to show the value of intangible experiences and how art does not need to be a tangible object necessarily.
Instead of receipts, Chan used tokens on Ethereum. Instead of fresh air, the token linked to a section of a pure white blank screen. Instead of gold, the smart contract received ETH as payment, and kept half the ETH deposited and the other half was burned if a receipt holder would burn their receipt. 101 receipts were created. The highest sales of these receipts approached $900,000 in August 2021 at the top of the last cycle with some high profile figures in the crypto space such as Justin Sun or even decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) like FingerprintsDAO collecting them. Within the last year the receipts have traded between $20,000 and $80,000.
Play WHCC below:
2022 is an important year in Chan’s oeuvre as he starts building games as artworks. Winslow Homer's Croquet Challenge is a digital game that can be played by anyone on the internet or by collectors as an application on their computer. The game reenacts Winslow Homer’s painting The Croquet Players (1865), in which the player uses characters modeled after the figures in the painting to play croquet within a recreation of the painting’s gilded frame. The game is a reminder that art —like games or politics or war— takes place within a defined arena according to a set of rules, and that certain ideas, facts, or people must be included or excluded for this arena to be maintained. It also touches on the sexual politics of this era, which saw the birth of the women’s suffrage movement. Buffalo AKG Art Museum owns the original painting by Winslow Homer and as part of their first acquisition of 16 NFT artworks in December 2022, they also acquired one edition of Winslow Homer's Croquet Challenge.
Chan continued launching thoughtful games in 2023 and exhibited in various museums such as ArtScience Museum in Singapore or HEK in Basel. He entered the PFP bandwagon with his game The Boys of Summer but TBOS is nothing like any other PFP project. “The Boys of Summer is inspired by the idea that statistics and numbers are the tools we use to tell very complicated stories” the artist says. The game is centered around a baseball player. Initially as you play the game, you get to manage baseball-specific attributes of the player but soon you are faced with unrelated aspects of the player’s social life, time spent studying in school, sex life, bank financials, and other mundane concerns. The game degenerates to absurdity until the player dies, serving as a stark critique of the quantification of self and the commodification of data.
nft://1/0xc92AB2DfF994dd77c0D2fe09F21d5CF9ea2BcC0a/959?showBuying=true&showMeta=true
Play TBOS below:
https://boysofsummer.chan.gallery/
In January 2024, Chan made his first appearance in a major auction house with the primary sale of Web3 Buddha at Christie’s. Web3 Buddha is a digital game about self-discovery and meditation in the age of an accelerating media landscape. The game sold for $10,671.
Play Web3 Buddha below:
