Chinese contemporary artist Yue Minjun drops first NFTs with market crashing. Is it a joke? ‘Premium quality NFTs are different,’ he says, and an art collector agrees

Contemporary artist Yue Minjun’s collection of 1,200 NFTs, called ‘Kingdom of the Laughing Man’, drops on August 8 at a time when the token market is crashing
So are they a joke? An economist says NFTs ‘never made sense’, but Yue says his have long-term value, and a major Chinese collector says art NFTs are different

Art

Sophie Chew

Published: 12:23pm, 8 Aug 2023

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Yue Minjun, one of the biggest stars of the vibrant, post-1989 Chinese contemporary art scene, is launching his famous alter ego – the Laughing Man – as a collection of non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

The 61-year-old, who lives in Beijing, tells the Post he is excited to use artificial intelligence to revisit his work in digital form and release products using blockchain technology, which helps authenticate each NFT and gives it value.

It is “a pure utopian world where my creativity can be boundless”, he says.

The August 8 drop of tokens on the LiveArt digital platform, titled “Kingdom of the Laughing Man”, features 1,200 unique pictures that borrow the commercial model of some the most successful NFT collections ever sold, such as CryptoPunks and the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC).

One of 1,200 NFT artworks based on Chinese artist Yue Minjun’s “Laughing Man” self-portraits being launched on August 8. Photo: Yue Minjun

The relatively modest starting price of 0.35 Ethereum (worth US$639 as of August 8) is a world away from the record price for a CryptoPunk token, set in 2022, of 8,000 Ethereum (worth US$23.8 million at the time).

Data from industry platform NFT Price Floor show that the lowest selling price of a BAYC token has dropped from 79.6 ETH a year ago to 29.15 ETH as of August 4. Meanwhile, the floor price of CryptoPunks fell from 73.95 ETH to 47.94 ETH (US$89,900) in the same period.

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And the market is still falling. A new report from DappRadar, a blockchain platform, found that NFT trading volumes in July were down 29 per cent month on month, to US$632 million.

Given the crash of the cryptocurrency market in 2022 and the sharp fall in demand for NFTs that followed, might Yue – often associated with the cynical realism art movement in China – be parodying the art market by reissuing the images of his puce, contorted face with eyes pinched shut from the strain of laughing?

Responding to questions from the Post, Yue says he is confident he is creating works with long-term value.

Yue is confident his NFT works will have lasting value despite the drop in the market. Photo: Yue Minjun

“Premium-quality NFTs are different from the rest of the NFT market. Today collectors are most drawn to the quality and artistic significance of the work and are less interested in speculation,” he says.

Sceptics say the market slump has vindicated their suspicions.

“The NFT market never made any sense,” says Antonio Fatas, an economics professor at the Insead Business School, on the outskirts of Paris. “It was yet another example of a technology promising a solution that either cannot work or is addressing a problem that is [non-]existent.

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“Many people jumped in with the idea that prices would go up and they would get a financial return,” he says.

However, the bearish sentiment has not spread to all corners of the digital art world.

“Over the past two or so years, we have seen a number of traditional artists entering the NFT space quite successfully,” says Sebastian Sanchez, manager of digital art sales at Christie’s, citing as examples Nina Chanel Abney, Leo Villareal and Loie Hollowell.

The NFT market and space is changing. It’s shedding noise, and consolidating around quality and institutional recognition

Jehan Chu, art collector and founder of blockchain company Kenetic

In May, Sotheby’s expanded its original NFT marketplace, Metaverse, by launching a platform dedicated to secondary sales, or direct transactions between collectors. And in July, US$525,000 worth of NFTs based on cropped sections of blue-chip American painter Jackson Pollock’s studio floor sold out within three days.

Jehan Chu, a well-known art collector and founder of blockchain company Kenetic, says that while the dramatic fall in the prices of BAYC and CryptoPunks tokens has raised questions about their long-term viability, he, too, believes fine-art NFTs based on exceptional works are sustainable.

Art which has some kind of validation outside the crypto market dynamic, such as the digital art produced by Refik Anadol and Beeple, is now being shown in major institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Hong Kong’s M+ museum of visual culture, he points out.

While there’s no denying the values of some of the most famous and valuable NFTs have dropped, some experts say that the market is simply evolving into something different than what it started out as. Photo: Yue Minjun

“So there are two ends of the spectrum. The NFT market and space is changing. It’s shedding noise, shedding excess and speculation, and it’s consolidating around quality and institutional recognition,” he says.

Although he has been largely quiet for the past decade, Yue has continued to paint his vividly coloured self-portraits, which began as a response to the social and political changes in China after the Cultural Revolution and the pivot to capitalism that followed.

He made headlines in 2007 when his paintings set an auction price record for work by a Chinese contemporary artist. In June of that year, his canvas The Pope sold for £2.15 million at Sotheby’s in London. A few months later, the record was broken when Execution, inspired by the June 4, 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown in Beijing, sold for £2.9 million.

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Chu, the collector, says Yue’s NFT venture could be an effective way for people to learn about Chinese contemporary art.

“A lot of people in the NFT world have no idea who Yue Minjun is, and this might be a way to be introduced to his work and that history. I think that’s great,” he says.