Installation view of Cody Choi: “HELLO KITTY: Database Painting Totem + NFT" at PKM & PKM+. Courtesy of PKM Gallery.Cody Choi’s (b. 1961) solo exhibition Hello Kitty: Database Painting Totems + NFT runs through May 17 at PKM Gallery in Seoul. The exhibition features 33 new database paintings created between 2022 and 2023 that combine digital data printing and traditional painting techniques and nine NFT works created and registered in 2022.
The artist had been working on the concept of data generation and digitizing masterpieces since 1997 and 1998, but after witnessing his son, who was in kindergarten at the time, using a computer mouse instead of a pencil to create images of virtual worlds based on provided templates, he decided to change his artistic approach.
Based on this experience, the artist was convinced that in the 21st century, data, not human imagination, will be the resource for creation and that creation by self-replicating data through algorithms will become a way of artistic practice.
He mined the image data stored on his son’s computer and amplified, split and developed it into his own “genesis data.” To complete the pieces, the genesis data underwent “smart layering” as few as 400 and as many as thousands of times.
