The world’s first NFT art exhibition is coming to the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing. NFTs, short for non-fungible tokens, are unique digital assets, individually identified on a blockchain, allowing one person to own a widely disseminated digital artwork.
The exhibition is titled “Virtual Niche—Have you ever seen memes in the mirror?,”. This exhibition is being considered as the world’s first major institutional crypto-art exhibition. It will feature works by more than 60 artists, including newly minted market darling Mike Winkelmann, better known as Beeple.
NFTs has recently skyrocketed in art market. Last week, another Beeple NFT sold on Nifty Gateway, an online marketplace for digital art, for $6.6 million—1,000 times the $66,666.66 it previously fetched when it first went on sale in October.
UCCA is hosting its NTF exhibition through its UCCA Lab, which it describes as “an interdisciplinary platform for new kinds of art-adjacent collaboration.” Sun Bohan, CEO of crypto-art company BlockCreateArt, is the curator, and Digital Finance Group and Winkrypto are co-hosting the show.
Among the other artists who will have work on view are DJ deadmau5, Mario Klingemann, Robbie Barrat, Pak, Fewocious, and Mad Dog Jones.
“As generational tastes shift, we felt it important to support an exhibition that showcases a demographic’s interest that has had little previous institutional examination,” Elliot Safra, a partner at AndArt Agency, which helped organize the show, said in a statement. “We hope this exhibition will help propel the dialogue surrounding crypto-art from the fringes into the mainstream.”