Five autumn NFT art auctions in Hong Kong, from Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood For Love footage to Shawn Yue’s CryptoPunks and a feature film co-produced by ATV
- NFTs backed by blockchain, the technology underlying cryptocurrencies, have caught the imagination and auctions in Hong Kong will test art collectors’ appetite
- Autumn sale highlights include actor Shawn Yue’s sale of CryptoPunks minted in 2017, and first-day footage from the In the Mood For Love film shoot
New NFT projects continue to be launched at a furious pace in Hong Kong, as celebrities join artists in getting behind technology that’s changing the way digital art (and now movies) can be bought and sold.
Before we look in detail at recent projects, here is a quick reminder of what NFT means.
The term stands for “non-fungible token”, a unit of data or code that is publicly listed in a decentralised (across many computers) digital ledger called a blockchain – in the same way that bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are held.
NFTs are, in short, digital certificates that serve as proof of ownership of whatever asset (in this case, art or film) they are linked to. “Non-fungible” means each is unique and cannot be replaced by another – unlike money, which is fungible.
NFTs solve the problem that people used to face when claiming ownership of digital work – that it can be shared around and copied, thus diluting the value of owning an “original” version of a piece.
The earliest NFT art series was “CryptoPunks”, a collection of 10,000 24 x 24 pixel cartoon head images, which was launched in 2017 and which are now trading for up to several million US dollars each. Since then, NFT art has grown in range and complexity, as the following examples of upcoming sales in Hong Kong show: