Singapore Art Week (SAW), a city-wide festival of art-centered exhibitions, installations and events brought galleries, art lovers and collectors to Singapore in January. While the talent of local and regional artists is undeniable, the event made me want to sell all my physical art and only collect non-fungible tokens (NFTs) going forward. 

This was not the reaction I expected. I have been collecting art for over 20 years. Yet after two years spent at the intersection of technology and art, both as a creator and journalist, I experienced an extremely visceral reaction against much of the art being exhibited.

Billed as a highlight of SAW was a new event, ART SG, Southeast Asia’s largest-ever art fair that featured over 160 international and regional galleries. For the wheelers and dealers of high-end art, ART SG was a big deal, with reports of some galleries completely selling out on the first day. 

This speaks to a surprising trend, highlighted in The Art Basel and UBS Survey of Global Collecting 2022. Since 2017, UBS’s contemporary art division has been monitoring the global art market and surveying collectors for their annual Art Market Report and Survey. The 2022 Report revealed some very interesting data. Despite the pandemic, bear market conditions and loss of favour in crypto, High Net Worth (HNW) individuals actually increased their investment in art significantly over the period. The report revealed that “across all markets, the median expenditure of HNW collectors in the first half of 2022 (at $180,000) was higher than the entire year in 2021 ($164,000) and the average in pre-pandemic 2019 ($100,000). Plans for the remainder of the year indicated intentions to spend even more, which could push the total median expenditure for 2022 to more than double the level of 2021.”

Of this, digital art accounted for 17 percent of their total investment, 10 percent of that purchased as an NFT. “Spending on art-based NFTs rose from $35,000 in 2019 to $44,000 in 2021, and in the first six months of 2022 had already reached $46,000, with 12 percent of the collectors surveyed having spent more than $1 million in this segment,” according to the report.

Ayesha Khan co-Founder The UpsideSpace at Generating / Iterating exhibition with a selection of artist works. REFRAME at ART SG (L-R) Refik Anadol, Kenny Schachter, Kevin Abosch, Yoichiro Kawaguchi, Sputniko!

I, on the other hand, walked these same halls filled with high-end contemporary art galleries and it all felt so boring…and well, web2. The only saving grace for me was REFRAME, a tiny corner of the show containing just six galleries showcasing digital art. Four artworks stood out to me. A phygital collaboration between Japanese-British artist Sputniko! and shoe designer Masaya Kushino where handmade leather stilettos that dispense rape seeds into the soil (a commentary on the Fukushima nuclear disaster) were being sold with a video NFT of the artist walking through various landscapes wearing the heels. Continuing a similar theme, acclaimed Irish crypto-artist, Kevin Abosch, asked artificial intelligence (AI) to design plushy characters shaped as nuclear weapons and then had them manufactured in a limited edition to comment on the absurdity of being comfortable with technology that can obliterate. 

Yet, it was the work of the next two artists that brought home the power of NFTs in enabling creators to reimagine their art in a whole new way and connect with a new generation of collectors.

American multi-media artist Kenny Schachter’s work Mulch, 1998, a 4-minute long VHS recording of the artist trashing a room filled with precious items, was being sold as an NFT. A defender of artist rights and outspoken critic of the establishment art world, this video was the perfect punchline, considering the space in which it was exhibited. Schachter has whole-heartedly embraced cryptoart and has been a fixture at major NFT festivals and exhibitions in recent years. 

Growth:Float 1987 by Japanese artist Yoichiro Kawaguchi depicts the changes of living organisms and is captivating in its movement and vividness. It was my favourite artwork of the entire week. This nearly 40-year old video artwork was created painstakingly on the computers of the day. Kawaguchi is a true pioneer who began experimenting with computer graphics in 1975. The accompanying description read, “He believed in a future society where computers (AI) would accompany us, not as a threat but as a companion by creating vivid colours and living creatures that grow and learn by themselves in the cold grey space of a computer room.”

Schachter and Kawaguchi created these works decades ago, yet are now bringing their art to life again as NFTs. It made me think of all the artists, filmmakers and musicians who now have a chance to rebirth their art for this new digital age. REFRAME was without doubt the most energising element of ART SG. 

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In search of more digital art, I headed to Gillman Barracks, an old army barracks that is now home to a number of art galleries, all housed in colonial era buildings. It’s a lovely spot. 

On my radar was an exhibition dedicated to GAN or AI-generated art. As someone who created an AI-art generated NFT collection in mid-2021 using a custom tweak of VQGAN-CLIP, I have been fascinated by the rapid development in this space with tools like MidJourney and DALL-E by OpenAI giving non-technical people an instant ability to generate artworks. 

The final few weeks of 2022 ended with AI taking center stage. On command text-to-art, text-to-video and text-to-voice tools became so much simpler to use. They also integrated seamlessly with the star de jour, OpenAI’s ChatGPT. 

It felt like such a sudden leap forward that panic erupted in social media feeds, polarising the creator community. On one side, creators vocalised their anger over the technology being tantamount to plagiarism and a delegitimization of the artistic profession. On the other, they were cheering the expansive creative possibilities that AI will bring. Either way, there is no stopping these AI tools. The cat is well and truly out of the bag. Microsoft’s $10 billion investment in ChatGPT has signalled to builders that AI will be the water cooler conversation of 2023, should we ever return to the office long enough to have one.  

With all this AI chatter abounding, I was particularly interested to check out Generating / Iterating, an exhibition by TheUpsideSpace, a new curator-led digital arts platform for SouthEast Asia, South Asia and the Middle East. Exploring the complexity of relationships between human and machine, this exhibition of AI-generated art was curated by Clara Peh, the founder of digital art community NFT Asia. It featured works by Jo Ho (Singapore), Billie Sng (Singapore), Chong Yan Chuah (Malaysia), Rimbawan Gerilya (Indonesia) and Ninaad Kothawade (India). 

Co-founder of The UpsideSpace, Ayesha Khan explained that the exhibition sought to contribute to the growing lexicon surrounding AI and art in our collective consciousness. With a background as an antique appraiser and collector, she also provides hands-on technical support to help established and emerging artists digitise and sell their art as NFTs. Khan said that she’s excited to bring artists from lesser known regions like Bhutan and Sri Lanka into the spotlight and give them a global audience. In the process, she hopes TheUpsideSpace will become a leader in showcasing digital art from Southeast Asia and India. 

One of the artists, Chong Yan Chuah, was also in the gallery while I was there. An architect who “came out as a digital artist three years ago” walked me through his metaverse artwork XIIN SYSTEM. Chong explained that he used his skills in VR and AR to create a dystopian environment. Set inside a kopitiam (a traditional Southeast Asian coffee shop), in the year 2042, patrons have their data mined by a shady government party while sitting at their tables drinking coffee and having food pumped into them through tubes. Built as a gaming experience, it is a comment on the value of data, greed and what happens when we choose to remain plugged into digital devices. He said, “It's fun to paint a dystopian condition because without that, we wouldn't know what's right or what's wrong.” 

So back to getting rid of my art…

On my way home from Gillman Barracks, I had an epiphany. 

My time at Singapore Art Week was spent predominantly staring at art in frames. It was only when I faced Yoichiro Kawaguchi’s digital artwork projected on the wall at REFRAME that it all clicked. 

For years, I have forced art onto the space of walls. The past three houses we have lived in have all been chosen based on the available wall space for my art collection. Yet, after I returned home from these exhibitions, I looked up at my ceilings and into the empty crevices and corners of my rooms, and realized that digital art is not confined or defined by space. It can be projected anywhere as the mood takes you. With the Metaverse, I can put on my VR headset and walk into environments where art envelops me. 

For so many years I have agonized over how to fit framed art into spaces. It now seems so irrelevant and outdated. Frames serve to confine you, box you in. A metaphor perhaps. Or an acute awareness of my current state. Thanks to the experience of Singapore Art Week, I acknowledge that I have well and truly become web3.