This new collection of 1/1 NFTs is actually a novel in 13 chapters, the illustrations for each of which are minted as NFTs. The 13 chapters describe characters, anecdotes, situations and memories that the artist has encountered on his travels over the last 22 years, through America, Europe and Asia. These reminiscences are woven together in traditional storytelling style, employing reality enriched by fiction, reflecting the artists interests in the work of J L Borges, Joseph Conrad, Milan Kundera and Franz Kafka.
Though the stories are predominantly set in his current hometown Kuala Lumpur, the characters and situations draw upon a variety of experiences gleaned from periods also spent living in Sao Paulo, Shanghai, Bangkok, Sheffield and London.
Hersoid‘s art is manufactured from memories, reminiscences and experiences witnessed during his foot-stepping through the humble everyday and the banal. The minutiae of the everyday feeds his library of anecdotes, and is woven with characters whose apparent impotence in the greater workings of humanity only draws his attention ever closer to their fascinating and relentless struggle to exist.
Anthony Gormley famously collected North Sea salt water for his Royal Academy exhibition, and juxtaposed it with 30 tonnes of Cornish clay. Such shaman-like adoration for intangible properties seems a logical focus for an artist to follow, but for Hersoid, the storm wind collected in a bottle from the Outer-Hebrides feels like cheating: anyone can make art from such majestic materials, but the true skill is in appointing similar significance to events and circumstances that through no fault of their own do not have the majesty of storms or elemental forces but are mundane and day-to-day. As such, he gleans his material from the detritus of experience- the forgotten moments just after an event of significance – the expression on the face once the cameras have turned away, the discovery of a worthless coin in an empty multi storey car park. And into this grey his art is to weave, with liberal abandon, the free-roaming fantasy of fiction- the improbable jostles with the unlikely and the impossible for a role in his stories. Chapters freely borrow from continents and decades at opposite ends of his life, and melt into a possibly pointless crescendo.
The 13 chapters belonging to this collection are being written as the project develops, evolving ‘on the hoof’ as the artist finds them in his everyday. Part One – the first four chapters – have been collected, written and drawn in the Monsoon season of Kuala Lumpur.
A roadmap – an actual map of the city itself – indicates the sequencing of the remaining parts of the novel, though geography falls foul of fiction here as physical locations indicated do not necessarily relate to the locations outlined in the stories. It does however give clues as to the progress of the novel’s production.
