Happily announcing the safe delivery of another museum grade archival quality print from Sunny Kuala Lumpur all the way to USA in less than four days.

Very happy to celebrate another happy customer, and thanks to my dedicated team of printers and logistics, and we managed to turn around the order in less than 24 hours.

watch the making of video here

Spirits, Ghosts and Mortals is the latest series of unique artworks and editions from Hersoid. The inpsiration for the collection was an old archive found on the MIT website, that the artist stumbled upon while researching another project. He found a photograph of a Chinese dignitary, taken in the late 19th century by renowned photographer and explorer John Thompson.

John Thomson FRGS (14 June 1837 – 29 September 1921) was a pioneering Scottish photographer, geographer, and traveller. He was one of the first photographers to travel to the Far East, documenting the people, landscapes and artefacts of eastern cultures. He had traveled through much of Malaya, Siam and India before eventually settling in Hong Kong in 1868. From there he explored extensively in China, one of the first westerners to do so.

Having lived in Shanghai from 2007 to 2010, Hersoid has long held a fascination with Chinese people and culture, in particular the role of the Authoritarian regime who have presided over the meteoric commercialisation and growth of China in recent years. But while there remains a veneer of western economic freedom for the population, there is an increasing tightening of control, which sits at odds with much western principles of freedom and democracy. In particular Hersoid is interested in the pervasive use of surveillance technology such as facial recognition, and its role in monitoring the population to provide data for the Social Credit system that has been rolled out in recent years.

This extensive surveillance network encompasses public spaces, streets, transportation hubs, and even residential areas. This network includes millions of cameras equipped with advanced technologies like facial recognition, AI, and big data analytics.

The Chinese government justifies the use of these technologies as crucial for maintaining public safety and controlling crime rates. Facial recognition systems are utilized in identifying and tracking individuals in crowded places, assisting law enforcement in managing public order, and monitoring criminal activities.

China’s Social Credit System, where facial recognition technology plays a role in monitoring and assessing citizen behavior, is used to assign social credit scores based on various factors like financial responsibility, social behavior, and adherence to government policies. These scores can impact individuals’ access to certain privileges or services. It can mean the difference between getting a loan or being refused, being given a job or being allowed to travel within or beyond China’s borders.

In this series, Hersoid has recontextualised the characters from John Thompson’s remarkable travels, with a view to commenting on the enormous changes that the country has gone through in recent decades, and how the spirits of these historical figures hang over a new population living in totally different conditions.

Most artworks have been minted as unique 1/1 NFTs on the ethereum blockchain via Foundation and one is also available as a limited edition release on Solana via Exchange.art

DAMfutures was the latest monthly decentralised publishing event organised by @DAMzine. It was the eighth iteration of this open source, cross platform digital publication, with artists from all over the world contributing unique and edition artworks across many different blockchain platforms.
Hersoid‘s contribution – a set of four unique hand drawn artworks listed as editions of 13, and published on the Solana blockchain via Formfunction, featured vintage imagery of futuristic visions from a byegone era.
‘I was interested by the idea of futurology, about the way in which since the birth of technology, humans have tried to predict what the future would look like, and how new technologies would shape our social, cultural and political habits’

The artworks will soon be available as limited edition signed physical prints via the shop. All NFT editions have now sold out.

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. 

Chapter I

Chapter II