«Made in China»

In 1701 the Jesuit missionary Joachim Bouvet sent Gottfried Leibniz a diagram of hexagrams from the Chinese I Ching. Leibniz looked at those broken and unbroken lines and saw his own binary system. In 1703 he sent his paper on binary arithmetic to the Paris Academy of Sciences. That story is the starting point of this crypto art painting.

The wall is dark green and covered in rows of tiny ones and zeros. A young woman with a dark bob and blue streaks in her hair sits in front of it, wearing a red dress that I built up with thick, lumpy paint and let drip at the hem. Gold chains hang over her chest. One hand holds gold coins marked with cryptocurrency-style symbols, the other a black smartphone with a screen full of app icons.

Her face is cut into strips that slide out of line. Black bars cross her eyes and mouth, and only the red lips sit apart, a little off to the side. Small blocks of yellow, red, blue and green hang in the air on both sides, like pixels that fell out of the picture.

Warhol began his Mao portraits in 1972, turning a political face into pop colour. In 1995 Ai Weiwei let a Han dynasty urn fall and smash in front of a camera. I came at it from the other side: the label on the goods, and the way a person becomes data. The coloured blocks remind me of Mondrian and his Broadway Boogie Woogie, painted in 1942 and 1943.

This is my original pop art painting, oil and acrylic on canvas, 120x90 cm, from 2022. Crypto art usually lives on screens; I wanted it heavy and painted. It could work as contemporary pop art for an office wall.

Most of my original paintings are already in private collections, but I paint originals to order in any size. To ask about this one, message me on Instagram or by email. A hand-finished lithograph of this work also exists, and you can order it the same way.