Mio Han.

Mio Han’s studio is a room the size of a generous cupboard in east London, lit by a single tungsten lamp she refuses to replace with daylight bulbs. On the bench: fist-sized objects in resin, plaster, and a pale 3D-printed polymer she sands until it looks like bone. Each piece is unique. Each piece is unfinished — by her own rule — until a token has been minted that describes it, and until the object has been photographed on a sheet of paper with a handwritten caption.

The work is easy to get wrong in a sentence. It is not “NFTs of sculptures”. It is a pair that cannot be split without becoming a different work. Sell the object without the token and you have a souvenir. Hold the token without the object and you have a caption. Han will only release them together, and she keeps a paper register as well as the chain, because she has watched marketplaces vanish.

I am not interested in the metaverse. I am interested in a thing you can drop on your foot.

She likes Tezos for the same reason many UK artists quietly do: the fees do not punish a small, careful edition. She is not evangelical about it. “It is a bus. I take the bus that stops near the studio.” Collectors who want to flip a listing without ever receiving the object are declined. She has a waiting list that is, she says, “the length of a shopping receipt, not a novel.”

We talked about display. She prefers a shelf to a plinth, a house to a booth. “If it can only live at a fair, it is a fairground thing.” Then she turned the lamp a fraction, and the polymer caught, and for a second the object looked older than the room.