The following interview was done in Telegram chat, the monospaced––non-blockquoted lines are from me, and the blockquoted lines are from MEK.

yo mek welcome back again in our second interview

(because the first one was too wall of text, my bad wkwk)

LOL, let's goooo— second round!

let's start with why you choose pixel art? I know you since more than a decade ago and you never do one. I know you're good and (too) fast at drawing tho

Well, initially I wasn't really doing pixelart right— since I was doing my typography series with adobe illustrator.. but goddamn that felt like doing work again RIGHT after work hahaha.

So I was kinda did a soul searching, and pixelart just happened to be in the menu. The UI/UX of aseprite felt like a game so it refreshes me a lot.

Quite fortified by my interest in 8bit games too. Legend of Mana is a game that my sis and I played religiously on our childhood days haha

opening the same tools as your daily job, kinda destroy the purpose of doing this lol

and yea I remember you vomit when played FPS game so you stick to retro games with low bit graphics most of the time. can't blame tho, gameplay > graphics.

100% this! (although I still got jealous people playing the newer games though still haha)

there's still youtube for that

or are you still nauseated even watching youtube of them?

Oh for that I found a really neat trick haha— if I went fullscreen, I will have the nauseating effect still. But if I use youtube's mini player and reduce the browser size a bit, the effect seems to be gone hahaha

are you allergic to technology or what lol

your pixel art direction is very much to old masters right?

haha I wouldn't have know any better what's with this 3D-phobic 😂

And yes, I look up to old ukiyo-e and shin-hanga masters. Trying to align my journey to their direction

among all other old techniques, why ukiyo-e and shin-hanga? it definitely very rare pairing pixel with them of course, I can't even remember any that tried

I have been always interested with their visuals, (our studio got my mural with ukiyo-e style in it for 10 years afterall, haha)

And I found great resemblance on pixelart with the old technique— in the sense of the limited colour palette and how hard, blocky things (wood plank, and pixelboxes) could represent something's that sentimental and soft.

I haven't been perfecting the technique like how the old masters are, obviously— but I'm heading there haha

I can see that resemblance for sure

damn right the mural, I see it everyday until I forgot it's there

since I collect your works too, I see that you made quite a number of landscape as the subject, is it because ukiyo-e and shin-hanga has the same subject?

they actually varied quite a fair bit; portraits, natural landscape, citylife, theatrical, even porn— just like how oil paintings are; shin-hanga and ukiyo-e are hardly a corridor of style, but rather, a medium of art. In matter of which they does indeed share the same undertone since they were made using the same technique.

I specifically chose natural landscape as my main exploration since it somewhat distill me from pretentiousness haha. I feel like an artist couldn't draw nature at its best if they're not honest with themselves (I'm not haha, still trying).

yea landscape painting is pure visuals and somehow relies heavily on artists’ own mastery of composition and delicacies. but I see you did another bold and more contrasting work in another chain, do you think different chain has different taste? or it simply your own strategy?

I do believe so, albeit not as religiously— that each chain got its own flair of taste and 'expectations' on artists, which could coincidentally conceived by how the blockchain/marketplace itself shape their structure and systems, I think.

I don't really have a specific strategy in mind haha. Right now my focus is just branching to blockchain that I would be a collector into— in this regards, TEZ and SOL are two of my early choice. But I think I'm almost ready for ETH as well 🙂

you will be everywhere this year it seems lol

do you have a tips or magic trick in time management? you're too prolific it's scary man. you're like, 2 artwork per day?

Haha funny that came from you, who already knew me for quite some time— 1.5 decade already 😂

But yes, I do 2-4 practice daily— I usually call them a practice piece until a narration breathed into them on mint days, then by then I can call them 'artwork' haha.

Excessive consumption of daily caffeine really helps— And also learning from our real work for 12 years, I learn to appreciate and respect time more. Respecting it to the minutes, even.

how much "unminted" ones in the bag as of now?

I think just shy from 400 by now... these are the folders for my daily practices, not to mention the main explorations that I haven't even reveal just yet haha

in all seriousness, I think out of those 400, only 30% of them are good for mints— rest of them are quite sub-par to my standards

I'm itching to say our usual joke but I will refrain in doing so in the public 🤣 but MAN THAT'S SO FUCKIN LOT

I need them small cards on my wall

HAHA, could be too sectoral for lots of people to understand it really. And stay tuned for the cards, friend! We shall see how it goes for those small cards haha.

do you have any plan for other form of work outside pixel?

It will be hard for me to find something as profoundly positive to me apart from pixelart, really— but I'm quite open to ideas 🙂

Lately I've been contacted by a couple of people who's keen on making cross-stitch, generative art, screenprints, etc from my work. In which I'm very delighted to take part haha! Perhaps that'll be the closest thing I got now in web3 'outside' of pixelart

not that I will complain if you stay at pixelart hehe

I think that's it for now, I'm sure this won't be the first time we will do something together 😉

For sure! Been a very pleasant talk, old friend. Proud to call you one of the two OG brothers I have outside of my family haha.

(with the other one being Tito 😂)

MEK.txt twitter / objkt / fx(hash) / formfunction / exchange art

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The interview was conducted in order to welcome MEK’s new work in Nifty Gateway under spirouzi’s publication: spir’s shrine, titled The Absence of Heat