Toshiaki Takase

Provisional English translation from the Japanese; to be revised by the artist.

Toshi / Toshiaki Takase. Artist, based in Tokyo. He works with the blockchain as material, taking smart contracts and token standards themselves as the body of the work, and asking how ownership, names and records come to be. In “The Ten Thousand” (2022), a contract meeting only the minimum conditions required to be displayed as an NFT; “OpenTransfer” (2022), an NFT anyone can use to move someone else’s token; “Summer & Summer Moments” (2022), which makes the “NFT summer” of 2021 into 576 fragments for each person to take home; and “PlayTrain”, which links ENS subnames to make a personal name into a single train, he has used very small interventions in the standards to expose what digital ownership and identity rest on. In his recent work “@toshiaki_takase” (2026), he opens the X account under his real name, which he has used since 2012, in a state where others can only take away.