CAFA Art Museum – Beijing

"Crypto Art: A New Possibility" was a group exhibition at the CAFA Art Museum, the museum of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, held in the museum's 2A Gallery. Presented as the first large international survey of cryptographic digital art at the institution, it was curated by Chunchen Wang, Richard Wearn and Maya Zhang and organised with the Dynamic Art Museum of Milan, whose logo appears beside CAFA's on the exhibition poster. The show brought together 46 artists and collectives from 21 countries, among them Beeple, Mario Klingemann, Kevin Abosch, Hackatao, Vhils and Sui Jianguo, alongside a substantial Italian contingent.

Federico Clapis was one of the exhibiting artists. Installation views show his work as a large wall projection in a darkened gallery: a night-time street of brick facades whose red-lit windows hold white robotic arms, in a setting that recalls Amsterdam's red-light district. A dark wall panel with bilingual Chinese and English text stands beside the image, and a projector on a low plinth sits behind a stanchion rope, keeping the presentation close to a cinema-like viewing. Visitors are seen stopping in front of the scene and photographing it with their phones.

The exhibition placed crypto art inside one of China's leading art academies, with an emphasis on the medium's artistic questions rather than its market. For Clapis, whose work keeps returning to the way technology enters intimate human life, the Beijing show carried his digital practice to a major museum audience in Asia.

Sources

• Crypto Art: A New Possibility | Beijing — Andrea Bonaceto