Mitchell F. Chan

Artist

Mitchell F. Chan · chan.gallery ↗

Raster

raster.art/artist/mitchell-f-chan ↗

Based

Born 1982, Canada. Based in Toronto

Practice

Conceptual art across software, generative systems, video games, installation, and public sculpture

Now

Presented new works from the Zantar video-game trilogy in New York and London editions of Insert Coin(s) in 2025.¹²¹³

In the set

LeWitt Generator Generator ↗ · 750 editions

Links

Full bibliography ↗

Mitchell F. Chan’s practice begins where an image usually ends: with the mechanisms that produce, distribute, price, and interpret it. Born in 1982 and based in Toronto, Chan works across code, physical installation, public sculpture, and gameplay.¹ His projects often resemble accessible entertainments or technical demonstrations, yet their real material is institutional and economic structure. Ownership protocols, statistical rankings, executable instructions, and player choices become means of describing how power moves through ordinary life.

This approach places Chan within a conceptual lineage while remaining attentive to the distinctive conditions of networked culture. His 2017 project Digital Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility adapted Yves Klein’s inquiry into immaterial ownership for Ethereum, separating the tokenized commodity from any conventional image.² Later projects transferred that investigation into generative art and games. Across these formats, Chan treats software as more than an image-making instrument. It is a medium capable of modeling causation, withholding information, assigning value, and implicating an audience in the rules it executes.

Chan’s central subject is not technology in isolation, but the conversion of rules into experience.

The instruction behind the image

LeWitt Generator Generator was released through Art Blocks Factory on August 4, 2021 as a collection of exactly 750 unique artworks.³ Its title announces a recursive operation. Rather than simply generating compositions in the manner of Sol LeWitt, Chan generates architectural conditions within which a LeWitt-derived instruction can unfold. The project begins from the logic of Wall Drawing 118, in which randomly positioned points are connected by straight lines. Chan’s software places those relations across continuous virtual walls, then moves the viewpoint away from an orthogonal position and subjects the architecture to one of six distortion algorithms.¹⁴

The distinction is critical. A conventional homage might reproduce LeWitt’s visual vocabulary. Chan instead works on the chain of delegation that makes a conceptual artwork possible. LeWitt’s instructions separate conception from execution, allowing a wall drawing to be instantiated by others in different places. Chan adds another delegated layer: code generates the support, distributes the points, connects them, establishes the camera, and shapes the encounter. The artwork is therefore not a single composition but a rule-producing apparatus. Every output records one settlement among instruction, randomization, virtual architecture, and perspective.

The collection’s ten selected renders reveal how strongly perception depends upon the generated support. Lines that might appear orderly on a frontal plane become dense webs, oblique fans, or spatial traps when walls bend and viewpoints shift. The image does not merely decorate architecture. Architecture becomes a variable inside the image-making process. Chan thereby complicates the familiar distinction between conceptual instruction and material realization: the apparent support is itself procedural, unstable, and authored through code.

Live on Art Blocks: lewitt-generator-generator-by-mitchell-f-chan ↗

Commodity form and expressive form

The project also extends Chan’s sustained analysis of ownership. Digital Zones had already asked what happens when the object being exchanged is a blockchain token while the experienced artwork remains deliberately immaterial. Contemporary scholarship situates that project within the longer history of Klein’s receipts and rituals, emphasizing how the structure of exchange helps constitute the work.⁴ LeWitt Generator Generator approaches the same problem through abundance. Its 750 editions share one executable concept, but each resolves that concept into a distinct visual and spatial event.

This tension between common system and individual output is foundational to generative art. A collector owns a particular realization, while the artist’s primary act may lie in designing a field of possibility. Chan sharpens that tension by invoking a historical practice already organized around the relation between idea and execution. The resulting collection asks where authorship resides: in LeWitt’s precedent, Chan’s reinterpretation, the program, the random seed, the platform, or the rendered edition. No single answer is adequate because the work is built from their coordination.

Chan has described his recent works as systems rather than isolated images, arguing that software can create analogues for the economic and cultural structures an artist wishes to examine.⁵ This formulation clarifies why the visual appeal of LeWitt Generator Generator is consequential but insufficient. Its lines, colors, and warped chambers invite sustained looking, yet they also make an abstract production chain perceptible. The viewer encounters an image and, simultaneously, evidence of a procedure that exceeds it.

Games, metrics, and constrained agency

Chan’s later games expand this procedural inquiry by giving audiences choices within modeled social systems. Winslow Homer’s Croquet Challenge entered the Buffalo AKG Art Museum collection in 2022 as a software artwork, according to the museum’s annual report.⁶ Its framing connects gameplay to Reconstruction-era American history, treating the game as an analogue for social rules. In a 2024 interview, Chan discussed sketching, level design, and the translation of research into interactive form, placing his game practice in continuity with both conceptual art and public participation.⁷

The Boys of Summer makes quantification itself the field of play. Built around baseball, character creation, and statistical performance, it asks players to experience how apparently personal decisions become data and how hidden structures condition possible outcomes. Critical accounts have emphasized the work’s treatment of systemic bias, constrained autonomy, and the uncomfortable slippage between playful choice and predetermined inequality.⁸ Clara Che Wei Peh similarly reads the web-based game as a reflection on markets and on the conversion of identity into measurable value.⁹

These projects illuminate the stakes already present in LeWitt Generator Generator. A rule can enable variation while also delimiting it. Randomness can produce difference without producing freedom. Participation can feel open even when every possible action has been anticipated by a system. Chan’s art does not resolve these contradictions. It gives them operational form, permitting the audience to see or play through the relation between agency and constraint.

From public object to browser-based institution

Chan’s movement among public sculpture, installation, blockchain, and games is less discontinuous than it first appears. Earlier professional accounts identified him with architectural-scale technological installations and public art as well as new-media practice.¹⁰ Each field requires attention to how bodies enter a designed situation. A public work organizes movement through physical space; a browser work organizes attention and action through interfaces, permissions, cameras, and code.

The institutional reach of that practice has grown accordingly. Digital Zones appeared in Christoph Büchel’s Monte di Pietà at Fondazione Prada in Venice in 2024, an exhibition centered on debt, property, finance, and systems of value.¹¹ In 2025, Nguyen Wahed presented Insert Coin(s) in New York and London, bringing together Chan’s video-game works in a dialogue among conceptual art, gaming culture, and blockchain technology.¹²¹³ These contexts demonstrate how his projects can operate as both autonomous experiences and analytical devices within broader exhibitions about economic life.

What distinguishes Chan’s work is its refusal to treat digital culture as a separate realm. The blockchain transaction, the baseball statistic, the game loop, and the generative instruction are all social technologies. They classify and coordinate people, objects, expectations, and prices. In LeWitt Generator Generator, this argument arrives with unusual economy. A familiar conceptual instruction enters a new computational architecture, then returns as 750 distinct images. The series asks viewers to look through each image toward its conditions of possibility, and to recognize those conditions as part of the artwork itself.

Bibliography

The references cited in this essay are listed below. For the complete bibliography see the Mitchell F. Chan links page ↗.