19 Jan 2024/67 min/Victor Mosquera
MLow X Victor Mosquera Interview
Surrealist Victor Mosquera on his Instagram era crew, Seoul, the Messi collaboration, open editions as a platform, and the most considered AI skepticism on the show.
Recorded October 2, 2023 and released in January, this is one of the longest and most peer to peer conversations in the archive. Mosquera arrives fresh from Harmonix, a group show at Ghana Art in Seoul with Beige, Mad Dog Jones and Fvckrender, friends of roughly ten years from the Instagram era when the goal was commercial gigs, showing all physical work together for the first time. He reports that Asia, and Seoul especially, is waking up to NFTs in a huge way, running a scene largely disconnected from Crypto Twitter that learned from the West's mistakes.
The middle covers the machinery of his career: auction houses as legitimization for the whole field (he believes he was in Christie's first group show to include NFTs), the FIFA World Cup campaign that led to an official collaboration with Messi, and The Collector, the open edition that raised roughly 400,000 dollars in January. His open edition argument is the strongest on record: it is about accessibility and malleability, a large collection that stays alive for burns, cross gated collaborations like his piece with Thank You X, and reworking two, five or ten years later, while 1/1s stay pure.
The deepest stretch is craft and conviction. He learned traditional painting in Colombia, went digital to land a Ubisoft concept art job that got him out of the country and onto Far Cry and Watch Dogs, and now pairs canvases with night version NFTs carrying his own Ableton audio. On AI he is respectful but firm: he uses ChatGPT and DALL-E for textures, yet believes the years spent earning a visual language are half the battle, and that a void sits between an AI output and its maker. The episode ends with the tables turned: Mosquera interviews MLow about his own path and concludes he was meant to be here.
What this episode teaches
- Keep the crew you came up with
Mosquera's closest collaborators are the same three friends from a decade ago on Instagram. The crew is who you go to when something bad happens and who you celebrate with, and coming up inside a tight group of shared interest is, in his telling, how all of them made it.
- Watch Seoul
Asia's NFT scene is massive and largely parallel to Crypto Twitter: collectors and artists the West has never heard of, production values and gallery architecture that often exceed Western events, and the advantage of having learned from the West's wins and mistakes.
- Auction houses legitimize the whole field
He values Christie's and Sotheby's sales less for the price than the signal: the most prestigious houses putting NFTs in their shows cements that digital art is real art, and any community member's sale there, like Grant Yun's at Sotheby's, is a win for everybody.
- Treat an open edition as a platform
A large disclosed supply is not a floor price product, it is a live substrate: he used The Collector for storytelling, a burn mechanic, and a collaboration gated to holders, and can keep reworking it ten years out. Limited editions and 1/1s he keeps as pure as he can.
- Cross gate collaborations
His Thank You X collaboration was only accessible to people holding both artists' open editions, which merges two communities rather than just putting two names on a piece. He argues the best collaborations start organically, not from floor price expectations.
- Pair physical and digital as different versions
For his Sotheby's contemporary sale the NFT was a night version of the canvas, not a duplicate: the physical carries texture and scale, the digital carries the audio and animation he builds in Ableton, and the pairing creates narrative room.
- The struggle is half the battle
His AI position rests on craft: years of learning color, lenses and image making are what let an artist say what they mean, and what moves people is watching a human be extraordinary at something. He is more impressed by the people who build the AI than most people using it.
- Let the market teach you pricing
He calls himself lucky but describes a method: release, watch how fast things sell and what people say, and adjust. Web3 collectors tell you directly whether you did a good job; planning perfect numbers matters less than surfing the wave and correcting.
- Only do what fits the vision
He turned down most web3 collaborations; Messi was the only one, because he was genuinely excited. Every brand deal must align with the body of work he wants to be proud of in 40 years, even after he is dead.
The conversation, topic by topic
Harmonix in Seoul
Mosquera had just closed Harmonix at Ghana Art in Seoul with Beige, Mad Dog Jones and Fvckrender, friends of about ten years from the pre NFT Instagram era. Their first ever joint show was all physical: his canvas and print, what he believes were Mad Dog Jones's first traditional paintings, Fvckrender sculptures, and large format works from Beige.
Asia waking up
His first trip to Asia, in March, shocked him: a massive Seoul scene full of people he had never encountered even on Twitter, events around Fashion Week, KBW and Frieze, and a culture crazy about art and technology doing things with production values that can outstrip the West. He expanded his focus to be part of it.
Collaborating with Fvckrender
Fred is like a brother: they live in the same city, bounce concepts constantly, and have a long running project called Sundials. The collaborations range from serious to ridiculous, including Fvckrender's joke collection I Love Victors, roughly a hundred deliberately ugly drawings of Mosquera that people actually bought.
FIFA and Messi
A lifelong soccer fan, he did a FIFA World Cup campaign, shooting promo with the trophy and players, which opened the conversation with Messi's team and led to an official collaboration. Messi then won the World Cup. He calls it the coolest thing he has done, hands down.
Christie's, Sotheby's and legitimization
He believes one of his early sales was Christie's first group show to include NFTs, alongside Fvckrender and Mad Dog Jones. The point was never the hammer price: the houses looking at digital artists proves the work is real art, and later moves like Christie's 3.0 created a dedicated lane. Grant Yun being the lone digital piece in a televised Sotheby's sale was, to him, a win for everyone.
The Collector open edition
His January open edition raised roughly 400,000 dollars and drew both praise and hate. He struggles to sympathize with floor complaints about a product whose large supply was disclosed up front, and defends open editions on accessibility: they get art into new eyes and wallets, and ownership carries sentimental pride regardless of supply.
Open editions as living infrastructure
The deeper argument is malleability: The Collector carried a narrative about a changing collector figure, fed a burn into a new piece, and gated the Thank You X collaboration to holders. Because the collection persists, he can rework it years from now. He credits Trevor Jones as the model of open editions done well and says Alpha Centauri Kid would be hard to beat.
Colombia to Ubisoft
He learned art traditionally about 14 years ago, live model painting, oils, watercolor and gouache, then went fully digital to break into video game concept art and get out of Colombia. Ubisoft relocated him to Toronto despite his having barely a high school degree, and he worked on Far Cry and Watch Dogs before realizing concept art was not his calling. Those guys, he says, changed his life forever.
Canvas plus NFT
For his Sotheby's contemporary sale in 2022 he paired a large canvas with an NFT night version of the same image, with audio and animation the canvas cannot hold. He currently sends the NFT to auction winners manually and is excited by Alpha Centauri Kid's T.R.A.C.E. with Transient Labs as a real mechanism; he also admires Thank You X's canvases with embedded screens.
The AI position
He uses ChatGPT constantly and runs his watercolor scans through DALL-E to generate texture variations instead of spending a day scanning. But for art itself he sees a big void between the final piece and the artist: developing a visual language over years is half the battle, and what inspires people, from a virtuoso musician to Messi, is how good a human is at something. MLow agrees on process integrated AI while doubting pure AI outputs.
Process
Everything starts in sketchbooks, now often the iPad: thumbnails kill weak ideas cheaply, then each surviving idea gets assigned its medium. Color, treated almost like collage, is his favorite stage. A single canvas can take a month, and at about 80 percent complete he will often overturn the whole picture.
The string and the five words
A literal painted string runs through many of his NFTs, physically connecting pieces when they hang in a row. The work circles an ongoing existential meditation, life, death and why we are here, with masks as shields, mirrors and protection. Asked for five words: connectivity, life and death, healing, introspective. His favorite thing is hearing interpretations he never intended.
Music, influences and pricing
Outside web3 he made art for Kid Cudi's Coachella performance and years of posters and visuals for his close friends in ODESZA; MLow attended the ODESZA pop up with Fvckrender that Foreign Family Collective pulled together in under a week. Influences run from ukiyo-e woodblock printers to Moebius, Akira creator Katsuhiro Otomo and Yoshitomo Nara, plus friends Ruben Wu and Thank You X. Pricing he handles by listening: the market tells you directly, and a management team now covers the logistics he is horrible at.
Turning the tables
Mosquera ends by interviewing MLow: the photography apprenticeship from age 8 to 16, the move to Israel, NYU public policy and the impact investing masters, quarterly exhibitions for friends a decade ago, and a project putting carbon credits on chain with artists like Danny Cole and Andre Oshea. Meeting finance people in web3, he says, was like two aliens meeting, and he concludes MLow was meant to be here.
In their words
“If something bad happened, that's the crew that you go to. If you're celebrating something good, that's also the crew.”
Victor Mosquera“These houses are looking at us and putting us in their shows, and that's a huge win for all of us.”
Victor Mosquera“If I think about something really cool two, three, five, ten years from now, the collection is still there. I can come back and rework it.”
Victor Mosquera“I'm more impressed by the people who develop the AI than the people who are making stuff with it.”
Victor Mosquera“What I want to have is a big body of work that is just things that I'm proud of.”
Victor Mosquera“We found ourselves basically in the same room. It was two aliens meeting, but because of web3 we have so much in common now.”
Victor MosqueraCite this conversation
Victor Mosquera in conversation with MLow, "MLow X Victor Mosquera Interview," The MLow Show, 19 Jan 2024. https://show.mlow.xyz/e/2024-01-19-mlow-x-victor-mosquera-interview.html. Quoted from a machine transcript.
Quotations come from machine transcripts. Check wording against the audio before republishing.