Moon–Block–Chain

One late winter night, the artist Yao Jui-Chung ascended the hundreds of steps leading up to Hongludi Temple in the mountains above Taipei. After arriving in the main hall, he set down his camera, picked up a pair of red wooden moon blocks, and recited this prayer:

Disciple Yao Jui-Chung has come to ask the God of Blessing and Virtue for the password for an NFT wallet. Thank you for giving me this password. I wish for world peace and good fortune for all. Thank you God of Blessing and Virtue, your disciple bows before you.

Seeking guidance by divination is a long-standing custom, but asking the Deities for a cryptocurrency wallet is something of an innovation. Tossing the moon blocks on the ground and interpreting their yes–no answer as a one or a zero gives Yao the first bit of information he needs. He would have to perform this ritual 128 times in total to compose a sufficiently long random number for his secure private key. Only Yao and the Gods know what it is.

Moon–Block–Chain: Prayers and Answers collections on Foundation

To make good on his plea for a lucky wallet, Yao minted two collections of videos and photos on Ethereum as Moon–Block–Chain: Prayers and Moon–Block–Chain: Answers. Each of the sixty-four Prayers is a unique five-second video loop (with sound) of the artist tossing moon blocks in the temple hall. Each of the sixty-four Answers is a unique still photograph of the pair of blocks on the temple floor, with an attribute that identifies them as angry, laughing, or divine.

Yao Jui-Chung. Moon–Block–Chain: Prayer #4 (2023)

This work approaches crypto-art from first principles. Creating a wallet becomes a devout act that is charged with meaning. Both favorable divination and asymmetric cryptography derive their power from the riddle of an infinite and random universe. Praying for fortune and speculating on currencies are two sides of the same coin. The esoteric rituals and garish art of folk religion find their match in the cryptic software and vulgar memes of blockchain culture. Yao’s Prayers and Answers take their perfect form when transmuted into individual tokens in a blessed smart contract. The artist is no stranger to seeking divine guidance (or putting his body on the line) for the sake of his art.

Yao Jui-Chung’s Moon–Block–Chain (2023) is the latest entry in his catalog of photo and video performance artworks made over the past three decades. It also follows his careful study and documentation of Buddhist and Taoist religious sites. A two-channel video of the new work was installed as part of Altar Space in the exhibition Yao Jui-Chung: Invidia at Tina Keng Gallery in August 2023.

Links

• Moon–Block–Chain: Prayers on Foundation
• Moon–Block–Chain: Answers on Foundation
• Altar Space: The Genesis of Yao Jui Chung

About

Yao Jui-Chung (b. 1969) is a Taiwanese contemporary artist, painter, and photographer. He represented Taiwan at the 1997 Venice Biennale, and has exhibited at major art biennials in Taipei, Yokohama, Shanghai, Beijing, Sydney, and Jakarta; and curated the 2020 Taiwan Biennial. Yao is the co-founder of VT Artsalon, and an Associate Professor at National Taiwan Normal University. The Yao Jui-Chung Archive of Taiwan Contemporary Art is in the collection of Cornell University.