Shavonne Wong

Shavonne Wong is a Singaporean new media artist who came to crypto art from the top of commercial fashion photography. She co-founded Zhiffy Photography in Singapore, shot campaigns and editorial, and appeared as a featured photographer on Asia's Next Top Model in the 2017 and 2018 cycles. Forbes named her to its 30 Under 30 Asia list in the arts category in 2020. When the pandemic shut down live shoots she taught herself Blender and started building digital humans, with a deliberate emphasis on Asian faces and bodies that stock virtual models rarely covered. That work became Gen V Agency, launched in August 2020 to supply virtual models to commercial clients, and it led her into NFTs. Her first collection, Love is Love, dropped in November 2021 and sold out within the hour; Idris Elba bought three of the editions as his first NFTs. She made Vogue Singapore's first NFT cover with The Fabricant the same year. She is a co-founder of NFT Asia, a non-profit that supports Asian and Asia-based web3 artists, and her argument on the show was that the gap facing those artists is a support gap rather than a supply gap. Her work has shown at the 59th Venice Biennale Cameroon Pavilion, Art Dubai, ART SG, Taipei Dangdai and the ArtScience Museum.

She builds photoreal 3D humans in Blender and places them in surreal or emotionally loaded settings, carrying her fashion-image discipline into rendered bodies. Named bodies of work include Love is Love, By Proxy with Lenne Chai, The Ties That Bind, Echoes of Identity and After Ophelia. Several pieces are dynamic rather than static: The Duality of ETH switches between an introvert and an extrovert state based on Ethereum network traffic, and the physical version used a footfall sensor to respond to visitors. Her recent work moves into AI and interactive installation, including the conversational companion Eva.

• Love is Love, 500 generative editions plus the 1/1 The Kiss, sold out in an hour in November 2021
• The RenaiXance Rising, Vogue Singapore's first NFT cover, made with The Fabricant
• Co-founder of NFT Asia
• By Proxy, 60 CGI and photography works made with Lenne Chai
• The Ties That Bind, her first solo exhibition, Singapore 2023
• Meet Eva Here, an AI companion installation shown at ArtScience Museum, ART SG and Taipei Dangdai

On the show