Ownership is the right to vanish, and vanishing is also ownership.

In the field of creation, the artist is confronted with a blank, empty space to begin with. Whether it is Claessens's canvas or Adobe's untitled file, there is only the original landscape.

This work "NEW VOID" symbolizes "NEW VOID #0000", a contemporary original landscape that we will confront when we create 3D models in a virtual space, as the beginning of death (birth), and "NEW VOID #0001", a contemporary still life in which digital flowers generated by AI, pixel skulls created by us and 3D model hourglass is placed, as the ending of birth (death).

This work has the dual nature of a physical painting (pigment) and a digital data (NFT), with the theme of a "new void" in the contemporary era of overlapping real and virtual worlds. However, the NFT has already been "burned" and the painting is linked to the post-burn (set as burned) NFT.

The blockchain is permanent data that cannot be falsified by anyone. Therefore, the NFTs (non-fungible tokens) that people own are in fact "non-burnable" data once they are minted. NFTs set as burned are just transferred to a space called the burn address, which is inaccessible to anyone, and they are owned permanently in that space. The ownership data of the burn address, which can be thought of as space debris in virtual space, is also reminiscent of "Onkalo", the world's first final repository for radioactive waste, which "owns" radioactive waste for 100,000 years in real space. Does the wasted NFT have a half-life?

This burn address narrates that vanishing in the real world is the "ownership of nothing". The concept of the void, which has been much discussed in Eastern thought, is being reconceptualized in a new virtual space called Web3. I think this is the kind of "Nil" that Yutaka Matsuzawa was aiming for in the past. I think Nil was not nirvana (liberation from the soul) but Null (null: a place in the program where nothing is indicated). In other words, it is not the vanishing of repeated birth (redeath) and death (rebirth), but the ownership of repeated birth (nothing) and death (being).

Currently, we live in a society where everyone records their memories of their life in a virtual space after their death, and reconstructed by others. The world has become as different from the once indigenous view of life and death. Our world is transitioning from liberation of the soul to possession of the soul. We need to reconsider what has been critical in our thought, philosophy, and religion. By inquiring about them, this work prays that people will own their souls responsibly to the society of the future.

We contemplate a new death.