“What I’m trying to preserve is not only the image, but the moment of making it. Ink carries time. It carries hesitation, pressure, speed, and the memory of the hand. With InkField, I wanted the machine to hold onto those gestures, so the work feels alive between control and chance, between the brush and the system.”
InkField
by Aluan Wang
InkField marks ICONIC's first collaboration with Aluan Wang, a Taiwanese artist and creative coder. Born in Taichung in 1982, Wang's hand learned watercolor and ink long before he learned to write code, and in 2021, he became the first Taiwanese artist to release work on Art Blocks. His practice uses rules, motion, and image systems to read the logic beneath natural things, holding to one belief: that simple rules, repeated with small drift, grow into something complex and alive.
Comprising fifty unique interactive works, InkField is a deeply personal return to the language of ink. Developed after Polypaths and Good Vibrations, it is the first body of work in which Wang turns his full attention to ink itself, building a digital brush rigged like a real one, a spring held between hand and tip, so that moving fast thins the line and moving slow lets it press and bloom. As he paints, the system records every stroke as data: path, pressure, velocity, and the millisecond pauses where his hand stopped to think. For Wang, the picture is only what remains. The act is where life is.
Open one of these works, and the painting begins again. Your browser performs the strokes live, in the rhythm they were made, with their hesitations and their breathing. It is not the playback of a file but the system re-performing the work, each piece independently authored, not one painting reshuffled by a shared seed. The hand is unmistakably the same. The performance is the thing you keep.
The fifty are companions, not variations, a curated collection rather than a series, each a separate sitting, a different breath, a different hour of the day when Wang picked up the brush. Each work can be paired with an optional hand-signed print: two ways of owning the same act, the digital work performing the gesture live, the print holding the single frame where the breath came to rest.
ABOUT
INKFIELD
For fifteen years, I have built systems instead of objects. Code is my primary medium — a way to make visible the structures beneath natural phenomena, and the gestures beneath a painting.
The breath, the hesitation, the silence between two strokes — these are what generative systems usually cannot hold.
inkField is my attempt to hold them.
It is a digital ink painting system, but what it records is not the image. It records the act. Every brushstroke is captured as data — its coordinates, pressure, velocity, the millisecond pauses where my hand stopped to think. When you open one of these works, the painting unfolds again in your browser, stroke by stroke, in real time. You are not watching a video. You are watching the system re-perform the gesture as it happened.
This is what I think the work actually is. The final image is what survives. The act is where the life is.
Each work in this release is a distinct recording. They are companions, not variations of a system running on its own — every one carries a different breath, a different hour, a different decision. The digital token holds the performance. The hand-signed print holds the moment it lands. Two ways of holding the same work.
I made these now, in the middle of a moment when image generators are flooding the world with finished surfaces. The systems I build try to make visible what those surfaces cannot hold: the duration, the hesitation, and the breath of someone choosing each stroke in time. Computing power can be faked. The seconds a body spent cannot.
ABOUT
Aluan Wang
Aluan Wang's work does not use code to erase the hand. It uses code to make the hand visible again. That is the point. Born in Taichung, Taiwan, in 1982, Wang is an artist and creative coder, but his hand learned watercolor and ink long before it learned to write algorithms. From his teenage years, he worked with water and ink, with the weight of a loaded brush and the speed at which moisture seeps into paper, and that knowledge never left him. His later work in audiovisual systems and generative art carried it forward by other means: in 2021, he became the first Taiwanese artist to release work on Art Blocks, with Good Vibrations, and across projects from the plant-like logic of Polypaths onward, he has pursued a single belief: that simple rules, repeated with small drift, grow into something complex and alive. His work has been presented internationally, including at ArtScience Museum Singapore and ART TAIPEI × COMPUTEX, and is archived by Le Random. In Taiwan, his work has also been connected to institutional contexts including the National Taiwan Museum and Art Bank Taiwan.
Wang stands where two rivers meet. One is the Western lineage of generative art, where the system itself is the artwork and the random can stand in for intuition. The other is Eastern, the qi that the old masters prized above all, and the blank space that lets visible ink speak to the invisible. His body remembers the brush; his mind learned to think in code. He treats computation less as a tool for producing images and more as a way of building conditions in which structure, chance, and human presence can coexist.
InkField grows out of that long investigation. After years of working with brush-like systems, Wang turns his full attention to ink itself, not as a fixed image but as a record of movement, time, hesitation, and intention. He builds a digital brush rigged like a real one and lets it record every stroke as data, so that pressing play does not show a video but performs the act of painting again. Comprising fifty individual 1/1 interactive works, InkField becomes both a field of images and a field of gestures, preserving the feeling of the hand inside the logic of the machine. For Wang, the picture is only what remains. The act is where life is.
Digital/Physical
Collectors of InkField will have the exclusive opportunity to purchase a unique hand-signed print, rendered on museum-quality Hahnemühle Photo Rag paper.
Print Details
Paper: Museum-quality Hahnemühle photo rag paper.
Signature: Signed by Aluan Wang
Print Sizes:
• 18 × 18 in. / 45.72 × 45.72 cm
• 18 × 24 in. / 45.72 × 60.96 cm
• 24 × 18 in. / 60.96 × 45.72 cm
Following the Digital release, Iconic will open a print claim portal where collectors can purchase their matching hand-signed print.
Buyers are responsible for any applicable import duties or VAT on their print purchase. Please allow up to 10 weeks for your print to arrive.
inkfield by Aluan Wang
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Collection Size
50 unique works.
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Purchase Price
$350 USD paid via ETH on Transient Labs
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Print Price
$350 per print paid via ETH or credit card.
Available following the digital release.
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Release Date & Time
Wednesday, July 29th at 12PM EST
PRE-SALE
ICONIC Art Pass Holder Presale: July 27th to 29th
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Release Type
Blind Mint (Instant Reveal)
EXPLORE INKFIELD
FAQ
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InkField is a curated collection of fifty individual 1/1 interactive works by Aluan Wang. Each work records the act of painting as data, then re performs that gesture live in the browser each time it is opened.
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No. InkField is not a generative series in the traditional sense. Each piece is its own self contained p5.js artwork, with its own code, assets, and JSON file. The works are grouped together as one collection, but they do not share one generative script across all tokens.
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Each work is a separate sitting, made from a different recorded act of painting. The path, timing, pressure, velocity, brush behavior, and pauses are distinct to each piece. Aluan describes the fifty works as companions, not variations.
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When you open the work, the painting begins again. Your browser re performs the recorded gesture live, rebuilding the piece stroke by stroke with its original rhythm, hesitation, and breath.
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No. A video is a fixed recording that plays back the same way every time. InkField stores the act of painting as data. When opened, the work is performed again by the system in real time.
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Each work stores the painting act itself: coordinates, timing, velocity, pressure where available, brush settings, random seeds, and the pauses within the gesture. The JSON file is part of the artwork and is read by the sketch at runtime. It is not simply metadata or traits.
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Item dThe hand, path, and timing remain fixed, but small details of the ink behavior, such as bleed, dry brush breaks, and texture, can shift slightly through the work’s seed. This keeps the replay from feeling dead or mechanically identical.escription
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Each artwork is interactive and should preserve mouse, keyboard, and touch behavior when viewed in the browser or iframe. The work is meant to be experienced as a living digital artwork, not only as a still image.
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Each token’s animation file points to its own HTML bundle hosted on IPFS or Arweave. That bundle includes the HTML, p5.js, assets, and JSON needed for that specific work.
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The digital work holds the living performance. The hand signed print holds the final moment where the gesture comes to rest. They are two ways of holding the same act, not duplicates of one another.
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Yes. Each work can be paired with an optional hand signed print. The digital artwork and the print are companions: one preserves the recorded performance, the other preserves its final resting image.
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Aluan created InkField at a moment when image generators can produce endless finished surfaces. His response was to return to what cannot be faked: hesitation, pressure, timing, and the seconds of a human life spent making a mark.
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You are collecting a unique 1/1 interactive ERC-721 token by Aluan Wang. Each NFT is not a video or a traditional recording. It is a self contained HTML and JSON artwork package, where the JSON holds every stroke as data and the player re performs the work live in the browser.
Each token’s animation_url points to its own IPFS or Arweave bundle, including the full HTML, assets, and JSON needed for that specific work. When opened, the painting unfolds again in real time, gesture by gesture, with the same hesitations, pressures, and timing as when Aluan made it.
In this sense, the NFT holds the system performing the work: the journey, gesture, and time. The optional hand signed print holds the final frame: the endpoint made physical. Two pieces of the same work, two ways of holding it.
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A Blind Mint means collectors purchase a work without knowing exactly which piece from the collection they will receive. With Instant Reveal, the assigned artwork is revealed immediately after minting, rather than after the full collection sells out or after a delayed reveal period. For InkField, collectors mint from the curated collection of 50 individual 1/1 interactive works and discover their specific piece right away.
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During pre-sale, collectors can purchase InkField using credit card, debit card, Apple Pay, or ETH. After pre-sale ends, InkField will only be purchasable using ETH during the public sale.
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