CRYPTO

An Updated Iconography of Fortune

CRYPTO explores how humanity’s symbols of fortune, wealth, protection, and spiritual belief evolve as our world changes, while the elements through which we express cultural identity and belonging continually shift, mutate, and merge with others. Drawing on the idea of the hidden and the coded, the project brings together cryptocurrency imagery, financial symbols, and references to vital elements such as water and air, expanding the notion of fortune beyond material wealth toward the natural forces that sustain life. In a world where value can exist as abstract data and cultural identities are constantly reshaped through encounters and exchanges, symbols become carriers of desire, belief, memory, and transformation. Through textile printing, these signs are reconfigured into patterns and material forms, entering into dialogue with textile traditions and the continual renewal of symbolic languages. CRYPTO proposes an updated iconography of fortune, exploring how textiles can give tangible, almost sacred form to the invisible codes, shifting identities, and evolving systems of value that shape our lives.

Inspired by the continual renewal of sacred objects in  textile traditions, CRYPTO approaches tradition not as a fixed inheritance, but as a living language that can be reinterpreted through the materials, techniques, and symbolic systems of its time. Digital and screen printing become means of reconfiguring this language, bringing contemporary signs into dialogue with the histories of textile ornament and symbolic dress. The reference to Japanese tradition serves as an artistic point of departure rather than an assertion of religious affiliation.

The project asks how our iconography might change as the systems through which we understand wealth, belief, and the natural world are transformed. What do we consider valuable today? Which symbols embody our hopes for prosperity, protection, and abundance? What new signs are emerging, and which meanings remain hidden within them?

CRYPTO explores the enduring human desire to make the invisible visible. It proposes an updated iconography of fortune in which symbols become patterns, patterns become textiles, and textiles become a surface for the beliefs, aspirations, and contradictions of our time.