Art Twitter Daily β Feb 15, 2026
Kazuπ¨ Art Twitter Daily -- Feb 15, 2026
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β‘ TOP SIGNALS
01 | Beeple Drops "Missing U" - Goes Viral
02 | Zero 10 Announces Art Basel Hong Kong Expansion
March 25-29
03 | Tyler Hobbs Shares White Mono for Fidenza Friday
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π₯ NOTABLE TWEETS
@beeple -- Drop
@SamSpratt -- Exhibition
@verse_works -- Discourse
@FLAMINGODAO -- Market
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π CO-SIGNS
@elischein -- Amplified by @ixshells, @punk6529, @mymoda_io
@beeple -- Amplified by 600+ including @SamSpratt, @FLAMINGODAO
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π° MARKET SIGNALS
Topo_graph Collection -- tsg kairos | Objkt | 1 XTZ
Blooms -- @Cory_Haber | Verse | Live
NORMIES -- @serc1n | On-chain ETH | Mint Live
https://normies.art
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β¨ ARTIST HIGHLIGHT
Emily Xie (@emilyxie)
NYC | Generative Artist
A decade ago, Emily Xie probably couldn't have predicted she'd become one of the most celebrated generative artists working on the blockchain. Yet looking back at her path, every step seems to have been quiet preparation for exactly this moment--a slow accumulation of skills and sensibilities that would eventually converge into something remarkable.
Xie grew up in rural America, the daughter of Chinese restaurant workers who pulled long shifts while she spent hours alone on the family computer. "Cyberspace offered so much more to explore than my small hometown ever could," she's said of those years. "Online, I discovered the world of art, learned to draw, immersed myself in video games, and built hideous websites." That combination--art, code, and the freedom to explore--would define everything that followed.
She attended Harvard, where she did something unusual: she majored in History of Art and Architecture while taking studio art courses, then earned a Master's in Computational Science and Engineering. At a time when the intersection of art and code was still a niche curiosity, Xie was already positioning herself at the crossroads. She ran a fashion blog called Books and Liquor during her undergraduate years--still archived online--indulging her eye for design and aesthetics in public for the first time.
After graduation, she worked as a software engineer at places like Sotheby's and Squarespace, bouncing between startups and big tech, exploring domains from machine learning to visualization. The work satisfied her technically, but something nagged at her. "I always had this nagging sense that I wasn't nurturing my creative tendencies to the fullest," she later reflected.
Then, sometime in the mid-2010s, she stumbled onto a generative art course on YouTube and fell in love. Here was a practice that merged her two selves--the engineer and the artist--into a single discipline. She dove deep, studying the foundational algorithms, learning the techniques, producing work in her spare time. In 2016, she managed to land an artist residency at Pioneer Works, the experimental art center in Brooklyn's Red Hook neighborhood, dedicating herself fully to generative art and showing it publicly for the first time.
But even then, she didn't think of it as a career. She'd return to engineering jobs out of necessity, treating creative coding as a beloved hobby rather than a viable path. It wasn't until NFTs emerged and blockchain-based art exploded in the aftermath of COVID that something clicked. "Once I discovered NFTs," she's said, "it dawned on me that my favorite hobby could actually become my career."
She made the leap, leaving her programming job to pursue art full-time. And then, in March 2022, she released Memories of Qilin on Art Blocks Curated--the project that would announce her arrival to the broader generative art world.
Memories of Qilin is a meditation on folklore, mythology, and cultural memory. The qilin is a legendary creature from Chinese mythology--a chimera with a dragon's head, a deer's body covered in fish scales, and a lion's mane. Xie's algorithm produces lifelike forms that hover at the edge of recognition, figures that feel like half-remembered dreams or ancestral stories passed down through generations, growing hazier with each telling. The name came from her mother, who saw the shape-shifting, mythological quality in the outputs and suggested the reference.
The project took six months to build. By the time mint day arrived, Xie was at home with her partner and close friends, watching the dutch auction unfold with a mixture of vulnerability, excitement, relief, and sadness. "It marked the moment that this project--which had been mine to obsessively shape and mold for half a year--was no longer in my own hands, but released out into the world," she recalled.
What makes Xie's work technically distinctive is her obsession with texture and materiality. While many generative artists lean into clean geometric abstraction or smooth mathematical curves, Xie builds systems that simulate the imperfect warmth of physical craft. Her algorithms produce grain, wear, frayed edges--the evidence of making that you'd find in handwoven textiles or aged paper. She studies real materials obsessively before coding: how thread crosses thread in a weave, how dye bleeds at pattern edges, how light catches on uneven surfaces. Then she translates those observations into rule systems that can generate infinite variations while preserving that essential quality of "madeness."
Her project Off Script, released with Bright Moments, pushed this further--exploring modern collage and what digital materiality could mean. The outputs look convincingly like glued-together pieces of found material, scraps of paper and fabric arranged with an artist's eye, despite being pure code underneath. "I wanted to explore color, composition, and form in the purest way possible," she explained. The series captured something rare: generative art that feels handmade.
Beyond Art Blocks, Xie has collaborated with LACMA on Generative Patchwork and Bullseye, a piece inspired by an 1896 quilt by Martha Lou Jones in the museum's permanent collection. She's shown work at Christie's and the Armory Show in New York. She teaches workshops on creative coding for beginners, approaching education with the philosophy that "the best teachers are the ones who see themselves as students."
Her creative process involves more than just coding. She starts with rapid prototyping--rough sketches in Photoshop, Procreate, or pen and paper--to visualize ideas before implementing them. The actual programming happens in JavaScript, usually with p5.js, but the conceptual work begins analog. And the business side of being a full-time artist takes more time than outsiders might expect: meetings with gallerists, DM conversations, emails, print fulfillment, speaking engagements. She tries to carve out large chunks of distraction-free time to enter the flow state that makes the rest worthwhile.
When asked about her favorite palettes from Memories of Qilin, Xie mentions Blossoms for its "unapologetically feminine nature," Dragon Dance for capturing the energy of traditional performance, and Hong Bao for its sentimental cultural reference and confident use of red--possibly her favorite color.
She's been candid about AI, feeling both "underlying existential dread" and genuine excitement about its creative potential. She sees room for synthesis between generative and AI art--both rely on algorithms providing randomness and surprise--and plans to experiment with incorporating AI into future work. But she worries about pace, about automation outstripping job creation, about a world where productivity increases but human labor becomes redundant.
Asked about her long-term vision, Xie stays humble. "I don't have a solid vision of what life looks like that far out," she admits. "I only hope to be able to continually put a piece of myself out into the world through my artwork. As long as I'm continually evolving as an artist, and as long as I have created things that inspire and resonate with other folks, then that's good enough for me."
For those new to her work: start with Memories of Qilin on Art Blocks to understand her textile-inspired aesthetic and cultural depth. Then explore Off Script for her take on digital collage. Pay attention to the details--the grain, the irregularity, the way edges refuse to be clean. That's where the humanity lives, hiding inside the code.
Links:
- Portfolio: https://emilyxie.art/about
- Art Blocks: https://www.artblocks.io/artist/emily-xie
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/emilyxie
π LEARN SOMETHING NEW
Wabi-Sabi: The Beauty of Imperfection
You've probably encountered wabi-sabi without knowing it had a name. That cracked ceramic bowl your friend refuses to throw away. The weathered wooden bench in the park that somehow looks better than the new one. The faded photograph that feels more precious because of its imperfections. Wabi-sabi is the Japanese aesthetic philosophy that finds beauty in transience, imperfection, and incompleteness--and once you understand it, you start seeing it everywhere.
The term combines two words with distinct but overlapping meanings. "Wabi" originally referred to the loneliness of living in nature, away from society, but evolved to suggest a rustic simplicity and quietness. "Sabi" means the beauty that comes with age--the patina on bronze, the wear on stone steps, the way things transform as time passes through them. Together, they describe an aesthetic that values authenticity over polish, intimacy over grandeur, and the natural cycle of growth and decay over permanence.
Wabi-sabi emerged from 15th-century Japanese tea ceremony culture, particularly through tea masters like Murata JukΕ and Sen no RikyΕ«. Before their influence, tea ceremonies were elaborate displays of wealth--hosts would show off expensive Chinese ceramics and luxurious decorations. RikyΕ« flipped this on its head. He favored simple, locally-made tea bowls, often asymmetrical or rough-textured. He built tea rooms that were deliberately small and rustic, with natural materials and muted colors. The point wasn't to impress guests with perfection but to create an atmosphere of humble intimacy where people could be present with each other and with the moment.
This wasn't just an aesthetic preference--it was a philosophical stance rooted in Buddhist teachings about impermanence. Everything changes. Everything ends. Rather than fighting this reality or pretending it doesn't exist, wabi-sabi suggests we can find profound beauty by accepting and even celebrating it. A cherry blossom is beautiful partly because it falls. A handmade bowl is beautiful partly because no two are alike, and partly because it will eventually break.
In practice, wabi-sabi tends to favor certain qualities: asymmetry over symmetry, roughness over smoothness, simplicity over complexity, modesty over grandeur, intimacy over monumentality, and the natural over the artificial. Materials matter--wood, clay, stone, paper, metal that oxidizes. Colors tend toward earth tones, muted greens, grays, browns. There's an appreciation for negative space, for what's left out as much as what's included.
The concept of "kintsugi" is closely related and makes the philosophy tangible. When a ceramic piece breaks, kintsugi repairs it with gold-dusted lacquer, highlighting the cracks rather than hiding them. The breakage becomes part of the object's history, something to be celebrated rather than disguised. The repaired piece is considered more beautiful than the original--not despite its damage, but because of it. It has a story now.
Western art and design have increasingly embraced wabi-sabi, though sometimes superficially. You'll see it invoked in interior design magazines to justify bare concrete walls or unfinished wood furniture. And while those can certainly express wabi-sabi principles, the philosophy goes deeper than just "make it look rustic." It's about an entire orientation toward existence--accepting impermanence, finding richness in simplicity, preferring authenticity to perfection.
For artists, wabi-sabi offers a liberating counter-narrative to the pressure of flawlessness. So much of art education (and social media) emphasizes technical mastery, clean execution, polished presentation. Wabi-sabi suggests that the wobble in your line, the unexpected texture, the thing that didn't go according to plan--these might be where the life actually lives. Not as an excuse for laziness, but as a genuine recognition that imperfection can carry meaning and beauty that perfection cannot.
It's worth noting that wabi-sabi resists precise definition. Leonard Koren, who wrote one of the most influential English-language books on the subject, emphasizes that it's more of an aesthetic sensibility than a set of rules. You can't just follow a checklist and produce wabi-sabi. It requires a certain mindset, a way of paying attention, a willingness to find beauty in places you've been trained to overlook.
Next time you're walking through a city, try looking for wabi-sabi moments: the rust pattern on a fire escape, the worn threshold of an old doorway, the way moss grows in sidewalk cracks. It's a different way of seeing--one that finds richness in decay and poetry in impermanence.
Learn more:
- https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-wabi-sabi-japanese-philosophy-finding-beauty-imperfection
- https://www.theschooloflife.com/article/wabi-sabi/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabi-sabi
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π SUGGESTED FOLLOWS
@graceb_art -- Generative artist, Day Garden series
@jalilwahdat -- Networked art experiments
@bitverse_art -- Generative art curator