Derek Boshier’s second ERC-721 token is drawn from his series K-Pop and created in collaboration with digital artist Shapeshifter7. Inspired by South Korean singing television contest King of Mask Singer – whose participants’ identities are only revealed when eliminated – the ERC-721 token depicts cartoon-like figures. The canvas set against the wall provides a clear link to the work’s roots as a painting, now brought to life through animation. Kellogg’s iconic “K” is playfully used as a signifier for both Korean pop music and American consumerism. The work nods to the TV show’s increasingly popular global franchise, highlighting aspects of cultural appropriation and universalist aspirations. For Boshier, these inherent elements of deception, mystery, and audience participation mirror the political landscape of the post-Trump era.

About Derek Boshier

Derek Boshier was an English artist who moved to Los Angeles in 1997 and spent the remaining years of his life there. His practice is characterised by astute and wry observations of popular culture. Among the first exponents of British Pop Art, what distinguished Boshier from contemporaries — including Peter Blake, Patrick Caulfield and Pauline Boty — was his trademark brand of satirical social commentary. Together with fellow RCA students David Hockney, Allen Jones, Peter Philips and R. B. Kitaj, he participated in the landmark 1962 Young Contemporaries exhibition that brought Pop Art to the attention of the wider public. Boshier worked in a variety of media, including painting, drawing, collage and sculpture. In the 1970s, he expanded from painting to photography, film, video, assemblage and installations, yet he returned to painting by the end of the decade. On what shapes his work, Boshier commented: “Most important is life itself, my sources tend to be current events, personal events, social and political situations, and a sense of place and places”. Boshier’s work has appeared in many museum exhibitions, including: the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Tate Britain and British Museum, London; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris. In 2016 Boshier was the recipient of the Honorary Fellowship of the RCA as well as receiving the Guggenheim fellowship and NEA award for the arts. Notably too, he was an accomplished teacher and lecturer. 2021’s Icarus and K-Pop at Gazelli Art House saw a new series of large scale works by Boshier, informed by the Korean programme King of Mask Singers and the myth of Icarus, a story of ambition and failure, reworked by the artist to critique modern ideologies and cultures.