With a background that blends tech, creativity and academia, Mimi Nguyen, co founder of Nguyen Wahed Gallery, is at the forefront of a new wave in the art world whilst pushing the boundaries of digital art. We sit down with her and talk all things digital art, what’s next for her gallery and her latest collaboration with renowned digital artist XCOPY at Zero 10 at Art Basel Miami Beach.
Your academic path moves from media art in Warsaw and Berlin to a PhD in engineering at Imperial College exploring creativity in decentralised systems. How has this cross-disciplinary journey shaped your curatorial & artistic sensibility and philosophy of what digital art should be – conceptually & technically.
My background in new media at art schools across Berlin, Warsaw, and London provided a conceptual foundation for engaging with art projects critically. However, it was my doctoral research in engineering at Imperial College, particularly my work with IBM Watson on emotional AI, that enabled me to understand digital art from a structural, backstage perspective. I think, this dual positioning protects against technological gimmickry. By combining both backgrounds, I can focus on conceptual works that employ advanced technologies as genuine medium rather than technical showcases. The distinction is fundamental: technology should serve artistic intention, not the reverse.
Your gallery, Nguyen Wahed is becoming known as a hub for digital, generative and blockchain adjacent art. Tell us more about your gallery, why you founded it and what you hope to achieve. How do you select artists or works for Nguyen Wahed and what is your main criteria especially for digital and generative digital art works.
I previously worked with artists on their online releases through a platform, which allowed us to build trust over years. As their practices evolved, there was a clear need for physical exhibitions of their projects. Simultaneously, I was developing knowledge of various private collection directions and began facilitating placements, matching conceptually rigorous works with appropriate collectors. This experience led directly to founding the gallery.
Since launching last year, I’ve continued working with artists I’d already developed relationships with, while carefully introducing new practitioners whose work demonstrates genuine conceptual justification for its chosen medium. My primary criterion is uncompromising: I deliberately avoid technological demos, arbitrary gimmicks, and especially those “physical” representations of natively digital works. Simply because something exists in a gallery or art fair doesn’t justify translating a generative or digital project into a physical object, that approach reduces art to wall decoration, which contradicts my founding intention.
The most compelling projects, in my view, are those engaging blockchain as a legitimate medium. These remain challenging to position with mainstream collectors, but generate significant institutional and museum interest. That trajectory excites me far more than immediate market validation.
You’ve just exhibited Coin Laundry by XCOPY during Miami Art Basel. Could you tell us more about the inspiration and concept behind Coin Laundry. And why a Laundromat is the setting for the installation.
We were operating within an exceptionally traditional context, the first time digital art was presented on the main floor of a grand-slam art fair. The challenge was immediately apparent: how to initiate substantive conversation about NFTs when public perception of decentralized finance is dominated by wash-trading headlines and bubble busting narratives? XCOPY leaned directly into this anxiety. We translated these legitimate fears into a direct, confrontational response through physical installation. I’d encountered Guillaume Biji’s work at Art Basel, both the casino room and the mattress shop, and had long wanted to undertake a project of that scale and conceptual audacity. The laundromat became the perfect literalization: a space where you clean things, where “washing” money is the euphemism, where the everyday and the speculative collide.
Can you talk me through what actually happens when a visitor engages and participates in Coin Laundry.
We developed both the physical installation and the NFT project in partnership with Shape. The technical architecture operated in multiple layers. We distributed free NFTs from one of the highest-selling NFT artists, but crucially, with a disclaimer stating that all these NFTs are bubbles designed to pop over a ten-year period. Except one. The bursting mechanism is completely randomized; any could pop tomorrow.
The claim cards themselves were randomized. Visitors received between 100 to 1500 bubbles distributed across Miami. Here’s what struck me: I deliberately stopped my explanation at that point and observed responses. Without exception, every single person asked: “How do I sign up?” The critical moment was immediate. It was transparent from the first sentence that these were NFTs, there was no obfuscation, and no one walked away. We engaged approximately 2,000 people and distributed every claim code in the booth.
Where does this installation sit in XCOPY’s larger body of work or evolution as an artist? Is this a departure, a continuation or a new direction?
Within his NFT practice, this represents his first substantial physical body of work. More significantly, it functioned as a purely conceptual, ten-year-long performative project, his practice evolved into something architecturally ambitious as well. I’ve consistently argued that XCOPY is among the few artists genuinely engaging with crypto art, distinct from blockchain art or digital art on-chain. His work has always circled around crypto culture itself, the speculation, the anxiety, the technological utopianism. This performative piece brought that engagement to a mainstream art audience in a way previous work hadn’t attempted. It’s both continuation and transformation.
How does this work comment or engage with broader social, financial or technological contexts (eg. speculation, digital economy, decentralisation?)
Coin Laundry operates as direct social commentary on financial anxiety and speculative culture. The installation weaponizes the very rhetoric that dismisses NFTs, the bubble metaphor, the anxiety around value creation and loss, and makes it the work itself rather than its critique. By distributing randomized bubbles that may burst at any moment, XCOPY inverts the typical speculative dynamic: instead of promising future value, he guarantees future uncertainty. This is a commentary on how we assign value to digital assets, how we rationalize risk, and how technology intermediates our relationship to financial systems.
The laundromat setting extends this: it references both money laundering and the mundane reality of economic life for most people. There’s a sharp tension between the speculative, abstract world of crypto and the quotidian space where ordinary economics actually occurs. The work insists on this collision, blockchain isn’t abstract; it’s embedded in everyday financial systems and anxieties. It’s a ten-year performance of financial precarity as artistic medium.
How do you see Coin Laundry in relation to the other works you exhibited at Miami Art Basel by Kim Asendorf and Joe Pease. Is there a shared conceptual thread or contrasting tension?
Art Basel presented our first opportunity to showcase these three distinct practices to a substantial audience. We were deliberately positioning three projects that utilized blockchain as medium while emerging from entirely different artistic lineages.
Kim Asendorf’s work represents generative art deployed across blockchain’s public ledger, his real-time code exists on-chain with no external dependencies, allowing the work to persist and execute independent of any centralized infrastructure. Joe Pease’s contribution was his first blockchain-based work, featuring two videos embedded within a smart contract; the second video ran concurrently in our New York gallery, while online viewers could interact with blockchain on his website, rolling dice to switch between the two video states.
These three artists embodied three distinct practices, generative art, video, glitch art, each approaching blockchain through fundamentally different conceptual lenses. My intention was to demonstrate that digital art extends far beyond prints or animations displayed on vintage screens. It can be architecturally complex, temporally distributed, genuinely dependent on technological systems for its existence and meaning.
What are some of the other projects and digital artists you are excited about?
I’m currently engaged with a two-year project called Aside Protocol, which employs a custom time-lock smart contract where all NFTs remain locked until an external event triggers their release. The most recent contribution, created by Lauren Lee McCarthy, will only unlock upon the artist’s death, a continuation of her socially-contracted works Good Morning and Good Night. It closes that project arc with philosophical rigor.
Next year marks significant anniversaries: we’re celebrating Transfer Gallery and founder Kelani Nichole’s ten-year retrospective of the Downloads project, in New York. Simultaneously in London, we’re also marking ten years since Zach Lieberman’s Daily Sketches project. Coincidentally, it’s roughly ten years since I left art school as well.
How do you feel about crypto and NFTs being adopted by the masses?
Even modest financial transactions carry substantial fees and processing delays. Blockchain resolves this entirely. For art, blockchain functions as a genuinely compelling medium, not merely conceptually, but practically, through provenance and archiving. Kim Asendorf’s code persisting on-chain exemplifies this: the work itself becomes a permanent, verifiable record.
Yes, we’re working with a relatively nascent technology. Ethereum launched a decade ago; XCOPY’s project concludes in ten years. Adoption accelerates exponentially. My daughter, for instance, bypassed entirely the technological generations I experienced, landlines, cash, card payments. Blockchain is simply native infrastructure for her world. I’m genuinely excited to observe how the next generation, for whom decentralized systems are foundational rather than novel, will engage these technologies and create within them.
Tell us about your art and digital art collection, what’s in it and are there any particular pieces or NFTs you would love to add?
I collect extensively in generative art: physical works by Manfred Mohr, Frieder Nake, Georg Nees, Harold Cohen, and Vera Molnár, artists whose practices established the conceptual vocabulary for what digital creation could be. From NFT art, I try to collect work from every artist with whom I collaborate. Several new projects I’m developing I hope eventually to integrate them into my personal acquisitions, though maintaining two physical gallery spaces across the Atlantic has made this more financially challenging than anticipated.
What advice would you give to people wanting to start collecting digital art? And what is the easiest way for them to do this in terms of platforms and wallets?
As with traditional art, I strongly recommend developing foundational knowledge or consulting specialists. Museum curators increasingly possess sophisticated understanding of this medium, Center Pompidou exemplifies this shift. When acquiring serious painting, one studies the artist’s practice and bio. The same discipline applies here. Platform accessibility and wallet mechanics are secondary concerns. Curatorial literacy and conceptual engagement should precede any acquisition.
What do you think the future of digital art holds? Will it stand the test of time? And do you think we are at the beginning of a larger shift in how art is created and consumed?
Absolutely. Within just a few years, we’ve migrated to purchasing virtually everything online, content, knowledge, transactions, communication, entertainment. Why wouldn’t this extend to collecting? Even traditional painters and sculptors I know speak extensively about Instagram’s transformative impact on their practice. There’s a significant paradigm shift occurring.
As the next generation reaches disposable income thresholds, digital art collecting will cross the chasm into mainstream practice. The infrastructure exists. The conceptual frameworks are solidifying. The only remaining variable is generational adoption, and that’s simply a matter of time.
XCOPY, Kim Asendorf, and Joe Pease, Zero 10 at Art Basel Miami Beach 2025 5th – 7th December 2025
