Nguyen Wahed is pleased to present Insert Coin(s), an exhibition of new works by the Canadian artist Mitchell F. Chan. This exhibition brings together Chan's new video-game artworks alongside selected significant earlier pieces, creating a dialogue between conceptual art, gaming culture, and blockchain technology. The new artworks in the exhibition tell a single story together through three distinct art series and one work of fiction. These works create a virtual space that is deliberately playful, exploring suspended narratives and including allusions to gaming culture, digital ownership, and contemporary media consumption. Mitchell F. Chan's video games present fully interactive experiences, where viewers become players engaged in carefully crafted narratives. By combining gaming mechanics with a conceptual art framework, Chan challenges traditional art consumption, inviting the audience to participate rather than merely observe.
For Mitchell F. Chan, if art has a duty - “it is to render visible the conditions in the world which are ubiquitous but otherwise invisible.” The exhibition includes INFINITE CONTENTMENT, an endless-runner video art loop telling the stories of three Zantar fans who build lives working in the game's innovative meta-economy. Released as three 1/1 editions, each contains unique aesthetic elements and different characters. ZANTAR, the centerpiece of the exhibition, finally reveals the game that has been alluded to in all previous chapters. The fully playable game is framed by a poignant short story about technology's impact on a young man's life. Graphics assets were created by NFT artist Gremplin (CrypToadz, Moonbirds Oddities). Additionally, the show includes WHITE IVERSON (2018), a sculpture made of 900 ethernet cables braided into cornrows.
Preceding the exhibition is the online series OVERTURE, an interactive generative operetta of micro-games serving as prelude to Chan's video-game works. Released as 250 unique editions with music by Alex Edkins and Graham Walsh of Metz and Holy Fuck.
Chan's previous works include Boys of Summer (2023), which uses baseball statistics as frBOYSamework to examine big data economy; Winslow Homer's Croquet Challenge (2022), the first videogame in Buffalo AKG Art Museum's collection; and DIGITAL ZONES OF IMMATERIAL PICTORIAL SENSIBILITY (2017), one of the first artworks expressed as a non-fungible token. The show's title Insert Coin(s) is typical of Chan's critical stance on the status of digital art, which he accentuates by using the familiar arcade invitation that transforms passive viewing into active participation, while simultaneously exploring themes of digital ownership, virtual economies, and technological impact on identity. It seeks to distill complex social and economic experiences into engaging gameplay, the closely observed interaction that stands in for broader cultural commentary. Here, Chan's artworks produce kaleidoscopic effects reflecting the constant stream of simultaneous inputs, references, and visual stimuli that constitute an intense, provocative and thought-provoking portrayal of digital life today.