Interview with NFT artist Emily Xie

Emily Xie is an NFT artist with increasing recognition in the generative art world. Her focus is on exploring patterns, texture and materiality.

In Xie’s most notable work to date, Reminiscent of Qilin, she draws inspiration from the colors and patterns of traditional East Asian art and strives to channel the sense of fluid movement found in classical Chinese brushwork in each composition. I spoke with Xie about how she became a generative artist, her influences and how she sees the space evolving.

Tell me about becoming an artist

Becoming an NFT artist, that was pretty exciting for me. I had a friend get in touch who told me about NFT place. And he told me about these platforms, for example, art blocksand from there it was history.

You know, from there I started making NFTs and realized wow, for the first time there is a technology that allows this art form that is infinitely reproducible, because it’s just pixels on a screen – just something you would create with code that you would post on the Internet – usually for people to see and interact with. So NFTs provided, for the first time, a kind of technology to make it collectible to assign rarity to something that is otherwise infinitely reproducible. And so I made the switch and I no longer work as a software engineer. I am now a full time artist.

Cool, so the technology adds rarity to something that is infinitely reproducible?

Yes, it assigns rarity to something that is infinitely producible so that it can actually be collected. So for the first time it provides an elegant way to allow flexibility and now in the generative art space there is such a thing as having a collector base. So now there is the opportunity for one to be a full-time artist for a living, which was very difficult to do before. Because we can afford it [to do it].

What are your influences as an artist?

The collection that is probably the most famous is Memories of Qilin. It was the collection that really launched my career. And for that I was greatly inspired and influenced by East Asian woodblock artists such as Hokusai. And so many wooden blocks, like the patterns, the colors, the sense of flatness that inspired Memories of Qilin. But at the same time I was also looking at a lot of, you know, Chinese brushwork, Chinese painting and that kind of flow, that kind of sense of movement.

That feeling of big whizzing brush strokes. It was also very inspiring for me. So I definitely let coming from an art history background inspire me to the great masters in my current practice. And so that was definitely the inspiration for Memories of Qilin.

But lately I’ve been inspired by artwork and artists from the early 20th century. You’ve probably seen it in the series Off Script. You probably saw the influence of Matisse. His carvings were very influential for me. I was inspired, certainly by Picasso as well [and his] composition palettes. So with these modern artists from the early 20th century, what I was really interested in was their dialogue around material, composition, shape, color and form. All these things are distilled into abstractions like works of art. I think it’s an interesting dialogue, especially with generative art and all that because your medium is actually code. So when you use code to emulate something that is deeply material and deeply textured. I find it quite fascinating.

And you mentioned that there is a lot of dialogue with traditional art. How would you define it?

Visually and the aesthetics as regards the visual language. Much of my work refers to things I studied when I was an art history student. It refers to someone [of those things] you know. I love going to museums.

I love looking at modern art. All this is inspiration for me. I think because there is such a strong connection to these genres, to traditional art, it might be more familiar to the traditional art world.

Where do you see the next stage we are headed with generative art? You mentioned that we have already gone through some phases of evolution. Where do you see the next stage?

I think we’re just going to continue to see further adoption and embrace of traditional institutions and traditional collectors is my guess. I really hope that generative art will land somewhere one day where it is taught and in the art history books.

There is a long history of generative art. I think institutions are a bit more eager to adopt it. I only see increased growth and increased adoption. Already with NFT’s generative art is delivered to one wider audience. It was adopted in a more mainstream way than before, like faster than ever before.

Do you consider yourself an NFT artist on Ethereum? What is your take on the kind of art we see on Tezos and other chains? Do you want to potentially move to another chain?

I am not tied to a particular chain. Right now I tend to produce things on Ethereum because it is a good blockchain with active developers. It is an active development community. Many people believe it. A lot of my collector base is there. And then I tend to release work on Ethereum because of that.

However, I’ve also recently dabbled in publishing artwork on Tezos. In some ways, Tezos has also been adopted quite readily by the traditional art world.

You see the Tezos booths at Art Basel. Many generative artists start with Tezos. It’s great. It’s a different ecosystem. It’s another collector’s base. It was quite an interesting experience to publish on Tezos. The reason I published on Tezos was because the gallery I was working with wanted to use it.

So I consider myself open to experimenting with different chains. But I would certainly do the research [first]. I would think that there is good life in the chain. I know some collectors are very adamant about sticking with one chain.

Tell me more about your work at Tezos.

It was at the Cortesi Gallery as part of the Armory Show. I made a large series of prints, Assemblage. It came with NFT and you could buy the print. It was very interesting I would say because when the gallery sold these pieces, the traditional collectors were more interested in the prints than the NFTs themselves, even though the NFT is the true manifestation of the piece.

The impression I get is that the NFT space is evolving as we speak.

The interesting thing about the space is also that it moves so quickly. It’s like sand under your feet and the landscape will change within weeks. It operates at a completely different pace to the traditional art market.