I have newly released two NFT collections as part of my ongoing exploration of new forms of expression. These works are positioned as an extension of the salt installations I have been creating for many years, and they are a quiet attempt to expand my ongoing themes of memory and time into the digital realm.
An Inevitable Expression Born from the COVID-19 Pandemic
At the core of my practice is a cycle in which I draw large patterns in salt within a space and, at the end of the exhibition, return that salt to the sea – a process guided by the idea of “continuing to create in order not to forget.”
However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, all opportunities to create salt installations suddenly disappeared. Under those circumstances, what emerged were flat works that I could make alone in the studio, and NFT artworks. Although I originally trained as an oil painter and had occasionally produced paintings, working digitally with a tablet was a completely new challenge for me. Once I actually dove into it, I discovered the same “layers of time” that I had pursued in my salt installations, and I became deeply drawn to the medium’s potential.
The NFT works presented here are a series in which the linear structures of my long-standing motifs—such as “labyrinths” and “spirals”—are treated as “layers of light.” Unlike physical salt works or conventional flat paintings, they offer a new way of viewing, and they are also an attempt to quietly leave traces of memory within digital space. Even if a physical work disappears at the end of an exhibition, it can continue to exist, connected within a virtual space. I create these works in the hope of exploring this “another way for memory to exist.”
Staying in Time – Digital Drawing
For my solo exhibition in Portland, I built a terrain-like screen across the entire floor using salt and projected a digital drawing onto it. The images shown here are views from that exhibition: on the left, visitors standing around the salt screen, and on the right, a close-up of the projected drawing. In the darkened space, viewers slowly walked around the work, sometimes bending down, watching the subtle movements of light and lines as if overlapping them with their own memories.
You can see more of this atmosphere in a video documenting the installation.
What can be acquired through this NFT is not the salt installation itself, but the approximately 40-minute digital drawing video that was projected onto the salt screen. The work records a maze-like line of light slowly appearing and disappearing across the undulating terrain of salt.
This video is literally a “trace of handwork,” created by drawing each line of light by hand on a liquid-crystal tablet and repeatedly erasing those lines myself. It is a video NFT that forms the core of my interactive digital art practice.
Throughout my career, I have used salt installations to explore memory and time under the guiding idea of “continuing to create in order not to forget.” This work is an attempt to extend that theme into the screen. Although the salt installation itself is cleared away at the end of the exhibition, I hope that the “labyrinth of light” recorded here will remain as a small vessel of time in which the flow of time and the faint presence of memory continue to quietly rise.
- Work format: 40-minute digital drawing video (moving-image work)
- Edition size: 3 (plus 1 artist’s proof held in the artist’s collection)
- Where to purchase: OpenSea
(This work is available via OpenSea, one of the world’s largest NFT marketplaces. For details about the work and how to purchase it, please refer to the linked artwork page.)
Colors of Memory – 9 Years
This NFT collection expresses the accumulation of nine years of time through nine gradient images.
In the digital format, you can closely observe differences in line density and clusters of color, as well as subtle textures shifting from deep purple to white.
This series is a reconstruction based on a salt installation I created in 2025. (See the related works page.)
For many years, guided by the desire to “continue creating so as not to forget,” I have used salt to explore themes of memory and time. When an exhibition ends, the salt works are always cleared away, leaving only their traces in the mind. Colors of Memory is an attempt to newly visualize that ephemerality and those layers of time through changes in color and line.
Each of the nine images represents a different “layer” of time. Deep purples evoke dense, vivid memories, while pale tones suggest memories that have loosened and drifted far away. Each image functions as an independent work, yet together they are composed to depict a single continuum of time.
- Work format: still-image-based NFT (ERC-1155)
- Edition size: 3 editions for each of the 9 images
- Where to purchase: OpenSea
(For details about each work and information on how to purchase, please refer to the linked artwork pages.)
You can view Motoi Yamamoto’s NFT artworks on OpenSea via the following page.
Please note that this work cannot be purchased directly with Japanese yen, credit cards, or other conventional payment methods. To collect it, you will need the crypto asset Ethereum (ETH), a compatible wallet (for example, MetaMask), and an account on the NFT marketplace OpenSea.
For visitors who are new to NFTs or OpenSea, the following English-language guides provide clear, step-by-step introductions:
OpenSea Learn Center
– What is a crypto wallet?
– How to Buy NFTs: Step-by-Step Guide for Beginners
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