Sovereign Art Pieces

Within Fakewhale’s ongoing research on artworks that operate as systems, Han introduces a decisive step in the lineage of on-chain practice. Each piece exists as a sovereign program that integrates image, ownership, and market logic into a single entity.

Code, protocol, and authorship converge inside a contract that functions simultaneously as artwork and interface. This convergence affirms that autonomy can emerge directly from the protocol and act as an aesthetic force.

Han’s project reads the field after a decade of standardization and platform dependency. It aligns creative expression with executable structure. Royalties become an intrinsic part of the contract’s architecture rather than an externally defined rule. Transactionality becomes part of the artwork’s living process. The entire market interface is compressed into a few kilobytes. The result is a minimal organism that performs independence while remaining entirely addressable on Ethereum.

The series rewires the mental model of NFTs. No ERC scaffolding, no token URI indirection, no external marketplace as primary venue. The script of each piece resides inside its contract source. A custom engine translates GLSL logic into JavaScript and binds rendering to the contract, while Solidity governs bids, transfers, and immutable royalties. The artwork exposes a complete cycle where generation, ownership, exchange, and record coexist within one legal and visual body.

Prodigy | 0xf7AEe95ca219D446EF35a28e6b2bae9c4E51fF07 | 13.4KB | March 2024

This architecture carries conceptual and critical implications. Creator royalties function as a rule set enforced by the same code that defines the artwork’s existence. Marketplace dependency gives way to protocol intimacy. The collector engages the work by addressing the contract directly. Every interaction writes history on-chain and becomes part of the piece’s permanent record. Governance appears as code clarity. Aesthetics emerges through execution precision.

Han’s stance extends beyond mechanism. He formulates a cultural argument about authorship in web3. Autonomy gains structure through verifiable constraints. Independence gains trust through public immutability. Compression becomes discipline. The work studies limitation as a generative condition and aligns with a broader genealogy from Autoglyphs to Art Blocks, from Deafbeef to Mathcastles, while advancing a distinct 3D on-chain pathway.

A final gesture sharpens the thesis. Han consolidates his practice by repurchasing and burning earlier works to inaugurate a fully on-chain phase. The act restructures provenance, reduces external dependencies, and repositions the studio around a contract-native horizon. The project reads simultaneously as an infrastructure proposal and an artwork series. It teaches protocol as medium and permanence as narrative.

Dawn | 0xc7ce96A48e9b7Bd43C028a44c791f7Da159FB9D5 | 11KB | February 2024

To expand on these foundations, Fakewhale engaged Han in a series of questions that explore the conceptual and structural dimensions of 1 of 1 Smart Contract Pieces, tracing how the project redefines creation, value, and permanence within the evolving landscape of on-chain art.

Fakewhale: In 1 of 1 Smart Contract Pieces the artwork and the contract coincide. What convinced you that authorship, protocol, and image could coexist within one inseparable form?

Han: The turning point was realizing that on-chain art isn’t just about storing an image; it’s about embedding intent directly into the protocol. I have always tried to follow cyberpunk principles in my pieces, creating truly trustless works where I don’t have to rely on any third party.

There is no separation between the visual outcome and the system that generates, stores, and authenticates it. It is about understanding that the smart contract itself can function as the medium: its rules, structure, and permanence become part of the process. The art piece isn’t just produced by the contract; it is the contract.

Fakewhale: You describe this approach as a Purist Intent. How does purity translate in practice, and how does it guide your decisions regarding rendering, storage, and internal market logic?

Han: Purity means removing anything that doesn’t need to be there. I’m referring to reducing everything to essential components: the code. If something can be computed, it should be computed onchain. There is something special that emerges: these pieces start to function like digital beings. They have their own rules for how to operate within the network. They live according to the code that defines them.

Digital Soul | 0x4f32740cf412d647A622ba27C36fa4B76F71601f | 8.5KB | October 202

Fakewhale: The project introduces fully independent contracts outside ERC standards. What conceptual value arises from building a sovereign standard, and how does this independence reframe exhibition, collection, and discoverability?

Han: It is a way of asserting sovereignty. It means the artwork doesn’t inherit assumptions, limitations, or behaviors from a shared protocol. Instead, it defines its own rules, its own structure, and its own identity. Conceptually, this creates a new category of onchain objects, pieces that are not instances of a standard but authors of their own standard. Each piece requires its own lens. Exhibiting it means engaging with its unique logic, not forcing it into a template. The contract becomes part of the exhibition narrative. It feels more like collecting a self-contained system than an asset type. Independence forces new pathways. They can’t be indexed or parsed the same way as ERCs, which means discoverability becomes more intentional, more curatorial.

Fakewhale: Your contracts embed royalties directly at the protocol level. How did the period when OpenSea made royalties optional influence your design choices, and which mechanisms ensure enforcement over time and potential edge cases?

Han: Royalties are what made NFTs transformative, but the ones who truly benefited were often the platforms controlling them. In my approach, royalty can live at the protocol level, embedded directly into the contract. As an artist, I’ve explored alternatives beyond enforcing royalties through a standard, but I do believe they should remain a core part of the protocol, inseparable from the artwork itself.

Fakewhale: Manifold shifted power back to artists by enabling contract-level authorship outside traditional marketplaces. In which ways does your approach extend or diverge from Manifold’s model, and what forms of autonomy do you consider essential beyond deployment and mint logic?

Han: Manifold gave artists authorship over deployment, minting, and metadata, which was transformative. But those contracts still lived inside broader marketplace rules, ERC standards, and external interfaces. I wanted to go further and create pieces that are not just deployed independently, but that behave independently.

Cycle | 0x3733cDd25B68f75842C3D7744Eda186Ac6d2E912 | 9.8KB | November 2023

Fakewhale: Given the dominance of ERC-based standards and their integration into marketplaces like OpenSea, how do you think about visibility and provenance when a piece adopts a sovereign standard that platforms cannot easily index or wrap?

Han: When I choose this sovereign standard, I accept that visibility on mainstream marketplaces becomes secondary. ERC standards optimize for distribution; I’m optimizing for purity. A sovereign contract may not be indexable by OpenSea, but it gains a different kind of visibility, one defined by protocol truth rather than platform recognition.This approach challenges the definition of a marketplace, and all we will need to do is focus on curation and meaning.

Fakewhale: Wrapper contracts introduce vectors for circumvention. Which strategies are you developing for un-wrappable designs, and how do you balance openness with the need for integrity?

Han: For me, the challenge isn’t only technical, it’s conceptual. Wrappers exist because ERC standards expect everything to conform to their worldview. There are ways of creating unwrappable contracts, it is all an artistic decision at this point.

Fakewhale: The visual engine compresses 3D on-chain graphics into a strict data budget. How does constraint shape your image grammar, and what aesthetic criteria guide decisions within such limitations?

Han: A 1/1 smart contract’s source code gives me 24kb of space, that’s the entire universe of my pieces. I intentionally divide it: 16kb for the artwork itself and 8kb for the internal marketplace logic. This isn’t a technical limitation but an artistic one. I want the entire life of the piece, rendering, circulation, and governance to happen within a single transaction. Technically, I could expand the size with a second transaction, but that’s exactly what I don’t want to do.

Even within 16kb, you can create incredibly rich 3D graphics if you understand how to sculpt structure, a kind of poetic minimalism. I enjoy this constraint because it gives the work a strange purity. These intricate onchain images occupy about the same data footprint as a simple email you send every day. There’s something beautiful in that: complex digital beings living inside extremely reduced space. The aesthetic emerges from negotiating what must be essential and what must disappear.

Wonderland | 0xB550005C939DA65Bf3510d47Ef43212Af59E1E72 | 13.8KB | April 2024

Fakewhale: Each piece functions as its own marketplace. How do collectors experience this autonomy, and what responses have you observed in their engagement, bids, and collecting behavior?

Han: There are blockchain native collectors who immediately understand the autonomy built into each piece. For those less familiar, I’ve created a UI that makes interaction intuitive. From another perspective, the experience feels familiar, bids, sales, and collecting follow standard flows. The innovation, however, happens entirely in the background: each piece functions as its own self-governing marketplace, enforcing its own rules and circulation logic without external intervention.

Fakewhale: On-chain permanence turns the transaction log into a living archive. How do you conceive of provenance, display, and conservation when the record itself becomes part of the artwork?

Han: The beauty of onchain permanence is that the provenance is fully readable from the smart contract itself. Every interaction with the piece, transfers, bids, and other behaviors, is recorded immutably, and this record becomes part of the artwork. It embodies its history, turning the transaction log into a living archive that is inseparable.

Fakewhale: You bought back and burned your previous works to restart from a contract-native foundation. What motivated this gesture, and how did it transform your relationship with your earlier collectors?

Han: I believe in living according to what I stand for. If I don’t take my own work seriously, why would anyone else? Buying back and burning my previous works was a risk I chose to take in order to create truly platformless pieces. Time will tell how this action transforms my relationship with earlier collectors, but it undeniably strengthens my story, showing that I am willing to take decisive steps to align my practice with my principles.

Fakewhale: If autonomy becomes the medium, what new forms of critique, pedagogy, and collection emerge from contract-as-art?

Han: When autonomy itself is the medium, critique and collection shift from evaluating images or metadata to engaging with the behavior and logic. Pedagogy emerges through interaction, by reading the code, tracing state changes, and seeing how the protocol unfolds over time. Critique is about understanding systems as form, and art becomes an act of engaging with these digital beings.

Collector Ledger
A distributed architecture of provenance shaped across two years of continuous on-chain evolution. The works have entered some of the most recognised private collections within the broader digital art ecosystem, forming a networked record of ownership that reflects the project’s reach and its cultural positioning.

For direct access to the full series and to explore each piece in its native environment, Han’s sovereign contracts can be viewed through the dedicated interface at:

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art.han.io

The site hosts the works within their original contract-based structure, allowing viewers and researchers to examine their rendering logic, provenance, and on-chain behavior in the context for which they were designed.