Dear Block Chen:

How are you? I have been thinking how to write this letter. Just ten years ago we were strangers. Now some people fervently express their dearest wish for our mutual bright future, while some still harbor their lingering doubt. I will not forget our encounters—especially those introduced by Trevor Jones, Paris Hilton, Claire Elise Boucher, Beeple, and others, which attracted many media’s coverage. It was like a ravishing opening scene in a fairy tale—it has to be a fairy tale, doesn't it? Especially in a world where people's attention is the most marketable and profitable commodity.

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I am covertly aware what personal characteristic heats up our relationship: a post-capitalist demand on financial game. Perhaps you know Maurizio Cattelan's work 'Comedian', a fresh banana taped to a wall with a piece of duct tape, which sold for 120,000 dollars at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2019. What it aims in revealing causes my ambivalence, to be honest. On the one hand, I'm very delighted to see that people are willing to use monetary item to support artistic concepts and ideas, and also excited about the possibility that this form of financial exchange will help to sustain artists to create artworks on a routine basis. On the other hand, my rebellious spirit also compels me to question the whole art-market system, and I also worries whether I will eventually get lost in this financial game.

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Do you share the same concern, now that we have gotten to know each other better? In your attempt at assuring and improving both the validity and the privacy of message exchange/transaction on internet, you formulated a new algorithm with distinctive characteristic of robustness (difficult to change) and democratic de-centralization. Then there came the idea of Bitcoin, crypto-currencies and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), which radically innovate our traditional concept of ownership, followed by the burst of NFT art market. This, of course, will not necessarily turn into another Ponzi scheme, because after more than three decades of expansion of neoliberalism, many people have achieved wealth freedom and need not worry about basic daily expenses. Their purchases of NFTs do not have toattend to rational profit calculations, but rather rely on emotions, such as the nostalgia of a pleasant past, curiosity about novelty, amusement aroused by internet memes, and so on. However, we cannot deny that certain speculations and opportunism wriggle to thrive in this petri dish of emotions/crazes. 

Dear Block Chen, how are you doing now? I miss you. This exhibition is a gift for you. With the artworks made by 12 artists from Taiwan, U.K., Canada and Ireland, this exhibition tries to vividly depict you, by reciting the attributes that you take, the values that you cherish, and the prospects you that hold, such as cryptography, decentralization, mutual trust, immutability, value setting, and fair transaction. I deeply hope that something truly wonderful awaits before us, a future that represents decentralization, equity, diversity and innovation—the values we both adore. 

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> Works of artists <link> (please click for the detailed information of all the exhibiting works)

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Sincerely yours,

《親愛的博拉克·陳》

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