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

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 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).

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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.

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

“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.

“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.

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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.