TL;DR
For Gioia Pan's SS2024 collection, the designer collaborated with Jimi Wen to unite fashion with generative art, given the latter's transformative potential to make personalized fashion a reality. Pan opted to use several of Wen's generative patterns for her SS2024 collection that originated from projects published on fx(hash).
On October 31, Wen released two brand new generative art projects on fx(hash) titled “Teardrop Remix” and “//void//able//void//”, where in addition to purchasing a piece of original artwork, collectors can also acquire a designer piece from Gioia Pan's SS2024 collection.
Introduction
Jimi Wen is a generative artist based in Taiwan. Initially interested in music, he worked as a roadie for the famous Taiwanese band MayDay before moving to the UK, where he lived for ten years. His strong interest in audio equipment led Wen to earn a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering in the hope of inventing the perfect amp for musicians and moved back to Taiwan.
Once there, he founded a startup and began experimenting with cooking. The startup burned through cash and eventually failed, which led him to follow the chef’s path more intensely after building a chef’s table in his studio. This too came to an end for Jimi, when he decided to simply play video games for half a year instead. He was seeking inspiration and always considered video games to be a form of meditation that clears the head and prepares you for what’s next.
It was in December 2021 that Wen saw generative artworks by Yazid, which inspired him to learn creative coding. Following the initiative created by genuary.art, he practiced creative coding every day throughout January. The following month, he released "Nothing Comes From Nothing," his first mintable project, on fxhash. It sold out – as did the rest of his releases during an epic six-month publishing schedule.
Much of Jimi’s work, as exemplified by "Teardrop", explores different aspects of classical Chinese philosophy and finds inspiration and meditation in sources like The Gateless Barrier, a collection of 13th century zen koans compiled by Wumen Huikai. His unique approach to generative art provides a perspective not often found in an artistic practice with deep Western roots, and that authenticity has helped him build a strong following with momentum evidenced by his work’s repeated success.
Using code to artistically express himself has been a transformative experience for Jimi, and it’s led him to feel adamant that generative art should be far more accessible in Taiwan, his homeland. That’s why he’s launched GDAP, which stands for Gross Domestic Aesthetic Product, a series of free IRL workshops, tutorials, and resources on Web3 technology to address the knowledge gap and reduce barriers to entry.
The GDAP initiative also exhibits students’ works, connects them with other industries for collaboration opportunities, and creates a local community around the generative art space where artists, collectors, and the curious can engage each other. As Wen describes it in his trademark humor, the GDAP initiative is a “kind of a poor man’s program to that of Claire Silver’s Accelerateart.”
More recently, Wen collaborated with Taiwanese fashion designer Gioia Pan on a collection of menswear and womenswear using Wen’s fxhash projects (un)//void//ble and Teardrop as both printed and woven fabric. This collection has also been featured in Vogue Taiwan.
Given his singular approach, achievements and initiatives within the generative art space, the fxhash team sat down with Jimi to discuss his artistic journey, the relationship between Chinese calligraphy, philosophy, and code, and his latest fashion collaboration with Taiwanese designer Gioia Pan.
fxhash: The inception of NFT technology allowed digital artists from all walks of life to become sovereign artists. What drew you particularly to generative art?
Jimi Wen: I was never trained as a painter, so my first instinct wouldn’t be to take up a brush. I was inspired by Yazid’s work, and I tend to think semi-abstractly. I think about shapes, lines, perspectives, rotations, and composition. In Chinese calligraphy, there’s splash painting (po mo 泼墨), which means splashing the ink onto highly absorbent rice paper, leaving the ink to develop its shape through chance. In my coding practice, I copy and paste many of the same code and just throw it around, so I’m not exactly in control of my code. Losing myself in the code is fine by me. There’s no debugging. I found this analogy and comparison between calligraphy and coding quite interesting.
fxhash: What tools do you use to create?
Jimi Wen: I use p5.js. For the upcoming redeemable project, I collaborated with the Dutch artist Elout de Kok - I used Tone.js and left all the visuals to Elout. We worked on animation, and I composed the music.
fxhash: What are the inspirations behind your works? You practice Chinese calligraphy and brought up the concept of postmodern calligraphy. How does this influence your generative work?
Jimi Wen: You are probably surprised if I tell you I only picked up the brush after I started creating generative art. For me, it’s a way to relax from coding. I learned Chinese philosophy through Chinese medicine, where I became familiar with all the Chinese abstract philosophy models.
I read Chinese calligraphy theory written in 220-589 AD and began thinking about how the practice of calligraphy advanced while sticking to the same principles. In “Dao De Jing” by Lao Zi, there’s a saying, that, “To learn is to add, but to live on the way of the Tao, you must subtract. It is interesting to find terminology used in Chinese calligraphy as Shu Fa (書法p[laws]) and in Japanese calligraphy as Shu Dao (書道 [way of Dao]). Relating this to generative art, sometimes we add code, sometimes we remove code, and sometimes we code to remove visual elements.
In “I Ching,” there’s a saying that “Characters (symbols) cannot represent language. And language cannot encompass intention.” In postmodern calligraphy, as demonstrated by Xu Bing, characters “generated”, could be beyond someone’s lifetime of imagination.
My theories also come from certain texts specifically for calligraphy, Western art history, and philosophy east and west.
Much of modern calligraphy became Jackson Pollock-ish in terms of forms of expression via abstraction; calligraphy has become a painting, and it’s not calligraphy anymore because letters are a means of communication, a layer beyond the purely visual. We try to move beyond a concept of understanding, not limited to the paper plane, as symbols, and as language, maybe even like grammar and syntax.
fxhash: Incredibly, you bring your understanding of Chinese philosophy into generative art. It adds another layer of meaning to your work. What are the stories behind "(un)//void//ble" and "Teardrop"?
Jimi Wen: For "(un)//void//ble", I was trying to do “flow fields,” aka Fidezas, which I failed. But looking at all 300 outputs, it felt like a dictionary for me to practice my own calligraphy. Although it’s two-dimensional, by looking at it long enough after, it started to look like the movements of the brush. Though it’s machine-like, made of only squares, squares that move along curves or straight lines. Because of the monochrome nature of the work, it has the illusion of depth. To me, they look like an imaginary set of calligraphy characters. These outputs of the algo are instructions to us humans on movements of the brush, thus creating a new set of calligraphy characters.
For "Teardrop", I started this work from a zen approach. It was inspired by a story about a fox: A fox has been reincarnated as a fox for 500 years repeatedly. He went to the Master and asked, “How do I stop reincarnation, and reach nirvana?” The Master replied, “What is your view on causation?” The fox answered, “One should not fall into causation.” The Master said, “You should not be blinded by it, but accept it.”
Initially, I was working on a very dull palette, but because the circular shape I was drawing was almost like closed arcs, 1.8pi with a very thick stroke width, which looked like a heart or maybe a butt. I decided to make the palette more colorful. As soon as I changed the color palette, I felt my grandparents were looking down on me from the sky. It was the first time I pressed Control-R and cried. So, I named the project Teardrop.
fxhash: Tell us about your upcoming redeemable project on fxhash and your collaboration with Gioian Pan.
I created generative animation for Gioia’s Taiwan Fashion Week show, which will be my next redeemable project. She used printed and woven fabrics on my projects "(un)//void//ble" and "Teardrop". Gioia said my works are very zen. In some of the works, she went with the flow of the print, but then the piece became too zen. So, in some of the works, she had to fight her intuition and reinsert herself back into the work.
Before collaborating with Gioia, I was contemplating the real-world utility of generative art. Not all generative artists will be canonical, but all generative art can be applied to design, furniture, and clothing, for example.
Learn more about how the redeemables work in his article, "Gen art eats fashion 2024 SS".
Check out Jimi Wen’s new projects, "//void//able//void//" and "Teardrop Remix".