Photo: Xu Liuliu

The rapid development of technology is changing the world in every aspect, including the art world. Crypto art, art preserved as part of a blockchain in the form of non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, has stormed Beijing's CAFA Art Museum with the new Crypto Art: A New Possibility exhibition, the first international, large-scale cryptographic digital art exhibition in China. 

"The art world is changing with new technologies like NFTs and AI. We keep an eye on these changes and present them to the audiences with an open mind," Zhang Zikang, the president of the CAFA Art ­Museum, told the Global Times on Tuesday. "This new exhibition can trigger and stimulate more discussion and exchanges on these topics."

The exhibition, the latest collaboration between the CAFA Art Museum and the Dynamic Art Museum in Milan, features 46 renowned artists from 21 countries including China, Italy, Spain, the UK and Germany. The works cover a wide range of mediums, from paintings and installations to digital artworks. 

The exhibition focuses on the potential of digitalization and the virtual space as incubators of creativity and innovation, and on the important influence of technology in promoting and encouraging the transformation of modern art through the presentation of the most interesting and innovative trends in crypto art. 

"We hope that this will promote contemporary art and dialogue, further stimulate creative and innovative thinking, and jointly develop new technological disciplines and the integration of science, technology and artistic research," said Richard Wearn, who is curating the exhibition with Wang Chunchen and Maya Zhang.

Art and contemporary technology are more closely intertwined than ever before. As technology has brought radical changes to the world, it has also spawned new forms of art. 

"It is increasingly common for contemporary artists to integrate technology into their artistic process and creative output," he added. 

Blockchain art is just a means, a revolutionary technology which has given many artists the opportunity to "receive recognition, to emerge and to express themselves with a more appropriate tool for the digital evolution of our society. This is a new medium that has the ability of reaching a larger and much younger audience, bringing them closer to art and making them enthusiastic collectors," said Pier Giulio Lanza, founder and director of the Dynamic Art Museum. 

The exhibition is set to run until March 24.