The world’s “most expensive” digital artist, Beeple (born Mike Winkelmann), opened his first solo exhibition anywhere in the world on November 13 at the Deji Art Museum in Nanjing, drawing nearly every “big name” in China’s art world. He brought some of the most significant works of his more than two-decade career: Everydays: The First 5000 Days, a series made over seventeen years and comprising more than 6,400 images, which set an unbroken record at Christie’s 2021 NFT auction—450 million renminbi; his first kinetic sculpture, Human One; S.2122, accompanied by a countdown display; and Exponential Growth, created specifically for the Deji Art Museum’s collection of flower still lifes.

Beeple creates work at the exhibition Everydays: Stories from an Artificial Future, Deji Art Museum, Nanjing, 2024. At the opening, watched by a large crowd, Beeple spent forty-five minutes creating the November 13 edition of Everydays: a giant “Beeple head” with hamburgers growing from its eyes. The background music consisted of hugely popular Chinese pop songs, reportedly selected by Beeple himself.

We spoke with Beeple, who had delayed his arrival in Nanjing by a full day in order to create Everydays, and with the exhibition’s artistic adviser, the internationally renowned curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, about this phenomenon and the future of digital art. Our conversation with Beeple was scheduled after his Everydays performance at the opening. Wearing a blue shirt and a dark sweater, he looked much as he had the last time we saw him, in Hong Kong.

But having just finished the work, Beeple was more animated. As he moved through the museum, he repeatedly engaged with visitors and joked in the gift shop with postcards printed with his images. Naturally, our conversation began with the day’s performance. Beeple creates an Everydays work in the gallery. Beeple, Everydays: Stories from an Artificial Future (created at the Deji Art Museum in Nanjing), 2024. “This isn’t actually the first time I’ve created in front of an audience. I’ve probably done it twenty-something times.”

“Most of the time, I don’t imagine every detail in advance. Sometimes my mind is completely blank, and I let the audience ‘shout out’ what they want to see.”

“But today, I did have the center of the image figured out: it would have a big ‘head’ of me. Everything else was improvised on-site,” Beeple told us. Beeple, at Everydays: Stories from an Artificial Future, Deji Art Museum, Nanjing, 2024. The gallery where he worked was the first fully self-contained room after entering the exhibition. On one side, a screen continually looped his Everydays series.

The other side held two enormous floor-to-ceiling mirrors, while the ceiling was mirrored as well, making the space feel even more expansive. Electronic images, hazy fluorescence, and layers of digital particles with varying textures created the sensation of passing through a computer screen. BEEPLE STUDIOS opened in Charleston on March 11, 2023, inviting many young artists to exchange ideas on-site. Little Hans told us that the gallery recreated Beeple’s Charleston studio, where he often invites young artists to visit and talk with him.

“We’re now immersed in the space of Everydays, but it’s important to remember that these works only recently began appearing in museum galleries. Long before that, they had been appearing on social media, where millions of viewers saw them every day.” To date, Everydays comprises 6,411 days. Since 2007, Beeple has maintained the habit of making one image a day and posting it at midnight, without interruption—even while traveling, attending weddings, or marking family anniversaries.

He has, in effect, adjusted his schedule around completing his “daily image.”

“I think when people see me doing this for seventeen years, they assume I’m extremely disciplined. I can assure you, I’m really not! For me, this is more like a source of momentum that keeps me going, no different from working out, eating, or other things like that.” Beeple laughed as he offered this “clarification.” Beeple, at Everydays: Stories from an Artificial Future, Deji Art Museum, Nanjing, 2024. “I think the reason I’ve been able to keep doing this for such a long time is that my expectations for each day’s work are actually very low.”

“For me, a successful day is one in which I post a JPEG online. By that standard, I’ve already had a very successful day today.” Beeple shrugged and spoke candidly.

“Everydays isn’t meant to be a perfect masterpiece. It is what it is supposed to be. I may have finished it in forty-five minutes, and it may not look like a sketch because the tools are so advanced now. But in terms of time, it is a sketch.” Beeple, Simple Pleasures, at Everydays: Stories from an Artificial Future, Deji Art Museum, Nanjing, 2024. In the exhibition’s white gallery, the Everydays works appeared alongside their digital originals on screens—a compelling dialogue between the Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 eras.

When we asked why these ten images had been selected from more than 6,400 works, Beeple told us that the Deji Art Museum had made the selection for the exhibition.

“Of the more than 6,000 works in Everydays, only about 150 are suitable for collecting. I think what makes the project unique is that there is so much to choose from. Deciding which subjects matter to all of humanity became one of the most interesting parts of curating the exhibition.” Beeple, at Everydays: Stories from an Artificial Future, Deji Art Museum, Nanjing, 2024. Beeple, Genesis Block. Beeple was delighted by the wall labels: “The Deji Art Museum did a great job interpreting these works. And, by the way, I read every single one from beginning to end.”

“Genesis Block was one of the works I made early in the Everydays project. Seeing it again brought up a lot of feelings,” Beeple said. Beeple, Departure. One of Beeple’s central subjects is ecology and environmental protection, human survival, and social change—topics that, in any artistic field, can sound like “box-office poison.” Yet he has a way of transforming these dry concerns into giant plants, ancient houses, aircraft, and other forms.

Beeple, at Everydays: Stories from an Artificial Future, Deji Art Museum, Nanjing, 2024. Beeple, Adaptation. Consider the enormous poisonous mushrooms rising above sea level—fly agarics—with people building homes around their thick stems. The image is also a form of satire: perhaps, in the future, humans will have to depend on highly toxic mushrooms to survive. Beeple, Regeneration. Set against this work is another, extraordinarily beautiful giant orchid.

Its date is specified down to the minute: 5:45 a.m. on Wednesday, May 6, 2089. An ordinary worker is making his routine inspection of giant orchids growing in the ocean. In this dreamlike world, all living things can exist underwater and grow with greater force, supplying humanity with more powerful energy. The poisonous mushrooms and the giant ocean orchids are two radically different yet strangely consonant flights of Beeple’s imagination about the future ecology.

Beeple, Every Hole Oozes Jabba, at Everydays: Stories from an Artificial Future, Deji Art Museum, Nanjing, 2024. Beeple also uses popular culture to stand in for human weakness, as in the slightly nauseating Every Hole Oozes Jabba. Jabba is a fictional extraterrestrial creature from Star Wars; of the “seven deadly sins,” he embodies five—pride, envy, wrath, greed, and gluttony.

From every opening pours the same large-nosed slug, mouth agape, legless, and coated in slime, symbolizing the excesses of contemporary society—information, desire, greed, and so on. Beeple, Garfield. Another work on view was the cartoonish orange Garfield, which may seem cute by comparison: cats of every size cover the image in layers, becoming hills, rocks, and gravel, while a human figure in a black top stands with his back turned.

What Beeple is actually worried about is whether the increasingly pervasive use of AI and technology will allow someone to do whatever they want anywhere in the world, creating a “Garfield world,” an “anime world,” or any other kind of world. What would the consequences be? Beeple, at Everydays: Stories from an Artificial Future, Deji Art Museum, Nanjing, 2024. The astonishing speed of AI’s iteration is, in fact, one of the problems Beeple keeps returning to.

We have discussed AI with Beeple more than once. When Sora was released in February this year, we spoke with him remotely and asked how such tools might affect digital artists. He told us that he had already been astonished then, but that AI’s development had since far exceeded his expectations.

“Just eight months later, in addition to Sora, there are already a whole bunch of similar tools, and they’re much more powerful than the ones available when it was released. You can generate video, text, keyframes, and so on. They’re developing so quickly that we can’t predict what they’ll look like a few years from now,” Beeple said.

“If you see AI as a tool that can help humans do more things, you’ll feel very excited. But if you see it as something that enables humans to do less, you may feel afraid of it,” Beeple said. Beeple with Human One, at Everydays: Stories from an Artificial Future, Deji Art Museum, Nanjing, 2024. In the same gallery, the first Human One Beeple created continues to walk.

Unlike before, this presentation includes a new setting and, for the first time, sound. From the limited box emerges the voice of this new human—seemingly close at hand, yet somehow distant. Since its creation in 2021, the first human in the metaverse has passed through five distinctly different chapters. The first, “The Birth of Humanity,” debuted in November 2021, setting out on an infinite journey.

The second chapter, “A Prolonged War,” was exhibited the following April at the Castello di Rivoli museum in Italy. At a time when the real world was at war, the world of Human One was also in turmoil. Beeple, Human One, 2021, at Everydays: Stories from an Artificial Future, Deji Art Museum, Nanjing, 2024. The third chapter, “Year of the Rabbit,” will be the most familiar to Chinese viewers.

In December 2022, Human One was presented in a completely empty gallery at Hong Kong’s M+ museum. That year was also the Chinese Year of the Rabbit, and the figure underwent a colorful technological rebirth—though beneath its brilliance, it seemed almost like a last flicker of life. By 2023, when the fourth chapter, “Total Collapse,” was shown at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the entire metaverse system had failed, becoming “404” and requiring the world to be restarted.

Beeple, at Everydays: Stories from an Artificial Future, Deji Art Museum, Nanjing, 2024. The fifth chapter on view, “The Singularity: Phase One,” likewise takes its inspiration from the relationship between AI and humanity, posing the question of whether humans will be replaced by AI.

“This first virtual human born in the metaverse is always exploring different lands and landscapes. But during that process, his body becomes increasingly robotic. As you can see, wires are beginning to appear in his arms. His next stop will be the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, Japan.” Beeple told us that the pleasure of the project lies in not knowing what kinds of changes he will make to its environments over the next thirty years.

“For me, that is also a journey, and it makes me very excited.” Beeple, Exponential Growth, 2023, at Everydays: Stories from an Artificial Future, Deji Art Museum, Nanjing, 2024. Created especially for the exhibition, Exponential Growth takes the Deji collection of floral still lifes as its point of departure, rendering old-fashioned bouquets in digital motion. Countless flowers pass endlessly through growth, bloom, and decay, and no flower ever looks exactly the same twice.

“Through programming, these works keep changing as time passes. In that sense, they are, to some extent, the opposite of still-life painting—or perhaps they are infinite still lifes,” Beeple told us. Beeple, S.2122, 2023, at Everydays: Stories from an Artificial Future, Deji Art Museum, Nanjing, 2024. Beeple also offers an unusual interpretation of the otherwise dry environmental issue of rising sea levels.

First we see a countdown display, telling us how much time remains until 2122. From the moment we enter the gallery, the numbers continue to diminish. We know nothing will happen, yet the display produces an inexplicable sense of pressure and suspense.

“The sea level in S.2122 will continue to rise according to the sea level in the real world. I’ll redraw the waterline in the work every five years. At the same time, the city in the work will adapt to the gradually rising water. The city will continue to function normally.” Beeple, S.2122, 2023, at Everydays: Stories from an Artificial Future, Deji Art Museum, Nanjing, 2024. Beeple said with a laugh that Western countries have been especially fond of discussing whether rising sea levels will bring about the end of the world, but he remains noncommittal.

“Come on, everyone—the water level will rise by one inch over the next fifty years. I think we’ll survive, okay? Just as the pandemic has passed, human beings are incredibly resilient.” Countdown panel from S.2122, Beeple, at Everydays: Stories from an Artificial Future, Deji Art Museum, Nanjing, 2024. Throughout the exhibition, two places can be viewed by passersby without entering the galleries.

One is the continually rotating kinetic sculpture S.2122.

“I think this blurring of inside and outside can arouse people’s curiosity and bring more visitors into the exhibition,” Little Hans told us. The design also reflects what Beeple has consistently wanted to express: making art visible to more people. Beeple, at Everydays: Stories from an Artificial Future, Deji Art Museum, Nanjing, 2024. The other public-facing section is the first chapter, “Digital Archaeology.” Beginning with the first electronic screen Beeple encountered when he got his first personal computer in 1991, it traces the tools he used over the past 20 years—from Microsoft Paint and handheld video equipment to Disney animation software, then Photoshop, Creative Commons, and Cinema 4D—as well as the evolution of his practice, from early “doodle-like” drawings through film, posters, design, music, instrumental videos, and cinema, and eventually to digital art.

Hans Ulrich Obrist in conversation with Yitiao Art at the exhibition. “In our generation, the extraordinary artists are almost all digital natives. They grew up alongside digital technology from the late 1980s and early 1990s, people like Mike. So this exhibition is not simply an exhibition of digital art; it is a form of mixed reality.” Little Hans told us that he had also coined the concept of “digital archaeology.” For Beeple, the exhibition is significant not only because it is his first institutional solo exhibition, but also because for much of his career the world he inhabited and the museum system were sharply separated.

Beeple with the Everydays work he created during his first visit to Nanjing in 2023. “Before this, it was difficult for me to imagine my work appearing in a museum environment,” Beeple told us. Little Hans, meanwhile, felt that the development was logical: “William Morris spoke very early about the idea of ‘art for everyone,’ making art accessible to as many people as possible. Practitioners like Mike have continued to do that.”

The Deji Art Museum’s location inside a shopping mall naturally aligns with Beeple’s and Little Hans’s shared ideal: “to make art a living, organic body that can affect more ordinary people.”