The Value of Art, the Art of Value
Learning about decentralization through art that reflects on global tipping points with Chow and Lin, an art-duo from Beijing
There are still millions of people who live below the poverty line today. In the realm of photography, poverty is often expressed through the portraits of the poor. It comes to a point when one gets exposed to one too many of these images, and the society that consumes this media becomes desensitized to the whole idea of what poverty is. So Chow and Lin, an artistic duo from Beijing, decided to bring attention to this overlooked issue of market economy in an alternative way—and use art and blockchain to reinforce their argument.
Stefen Chow and Hui-Yi Lin both grew up in Singapore. “We were both born with silver spoons in our mouths, in middle-class families” Stefen says, “But before we were of school age, both of our families have actually lost everything.” Stefen is a trained photographer, and Lin used to work in the Singapore government, where she would see how policies would affect people on the ground. Their experiences were very different, but they shared a personal relation to poverty.
With the help of Lin, a trained economist, they started studying poverty as an economic term, and broke poverty into an amount of food a poor person can have in a single day. Their intention was to show that poverty does not equate to homelessness; at the poverty line, people do have income, it’s just not enough to have a decent level of living. Back in 2010 the poverty line in China was drawn at around 50 cents US. For that value, a person could get some vegetables, rice, or one single chicken breast at the market. Armed with data, Chow and Lin dove into this experiment. They took pictures of the food bought with the daily quota on top of newspapers, because of how universally affordable and familiar it is as an object, no matter the political system. For the next ten years Chow and Lin took pictures of the food bought at the poverty line in different countries. The resulting project is called The Poverty Line.
They were looking at such food staples around the world: China, India, Norway, Denmark, France, Germany, and so on, then turned their attention to a Chinese mantou bun, a “tasteless bagel” that’s very filling and easy to carry. Over the years the cost of a mantou rose to 1 renminbi, a coin similar to a one euro coin. Simultaneously over the same period of time cash as a form of exchange has virtually disappeared in China, giving way to digital wallets and cryptocurrencies. With that, the whole understanding and role of money, as well as the notion of stability, has changed. Only the poor still had cash.
Through looking at the nature of an exchange that has evolved with the disappearance of cash, Chow and Lin realized that food, a necessity for life, is heavily subsidized in many countries, with food staples taken for granted. Through an experimentation with the concept of exchange, Chow and Lin’s project Decentralized Value Systems was born. They would play with extracting the shared aspect of money from a pair of apples equaling 1200 mantous. Turning the different foods into a mosaic on the floor, they asked: does it still have value, or is it wasted? Shown lying on the floor, it would seem essential; but when food was equated to money instead of other foods, somehow it wasn’t worth that much anymore. Throughout the process, Chow and Lin wanted to question our logic of what the value is.
Eventually the project became an NFT series sold of Opensea, making a point about the volatility of value even seen through the means of cryptocurrency. “What systems are we operating in?”, Chow and Lin ask, “What systems are bound to stay or change? Food is available as long as the systems are stable, but our supply chains are changing due to global warming and political events. And with this fragility essential food becomes expensive.
A few years back Chow and Lin visited a UNHCR refugee camp in Kakuma, Kenya, and witnessed the power of the systems that divide us. This visit made them see that the world does not consist of people with money and without, but those with status and without it, the have and the have-nots. The power that the systems have of destabilizing such essential aspects of living as food or status is at the core of Chow and Lin’s art.
Check this out
- Wach my conversation with Stefen Chow (and please forgive the dreadful echo!)
- Chow and Lin’s projects The Poverty Line and Decentralized Value Systems
And join us this week! We are hosting a conversation with Laura François, founder of Actually People and the Creative Ones NFT project who looks at art as a method of communication and ecosystem empowerment. We’ll hear about her experience with alternative decentralized funding mechanisms for social good, and building physical social impact spaces through digital communities.
Want to learn more and join our 20-week-long learning journey?
This week we’re talking about the value of art and the art of value with a Beijing-based art duo Chow and Lin. We speak about merging art with market economics, bringing attention to the global tipping points of our times, like the poverty line, and using Web3 technology to challenge the question of value in art and social issues.
Katia Zoritch, writer at the House of Beautiful Business
