EXCALIBUR is a Japanese art circle based in Tokyo and Kyoto that produces pixel art, prints, and blockchain-based works exploring video game aesthetics, Japanese myth, and history.,Formed in 2006, it is composed of Yoshinori Tanaka, born in Kyoto, and Maiko Iwata, born in Tokyo.It uses Dot-e, pixel art methods once used in video game graphics, to draw landscapes rooted in ukiyo-e woodblock printmaking.,
The NEW GAME+ series, begun just before the COVID-19 pandemic, reworks the video game convention of replaying a cleared game with retained status, applying that idea to life after a global reset.,,The METABIT series, subject of a 2024 solo exhibition in Paris, extends Nicholas Negroponte's 1990s account of a shift from atoms to bits into the 2020s, proposing a move toward what it describes as NeoAtoms as virtual and physical experience overlap.,Its Ukiyo.e series renders modern Tokyo locations in Dot-e, referencing Utagawa Hiroshige's woodblock print series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo.,Individual prints from the series have also been issued as limited-edition works in pigmented ink on silver paper.
EXCALIBUR was among the Japanese artists identified as having engaged with NFTs at “Right Click Live”, Japan's first international NFT art event, held in Tokyo in December 2022. A still from its 2021 blockchain-based work Patriotism pilgrimage mandala illustrated coverage of the event.At the 2023 Tokyo exhibition “Proof of X — Blockchain As A New Medium For Art”, EXCALIBUR presented NEW VOID (2023), a performance work that was minted and then sent to an inaccessible burn address two minutes later, addressing the permanence and erasure of data on the blockchain.In January 2026, its pixel art was shown alongside work by Larva Labs and PIV in “Onchain Harmony: Punks & Pixels” at Bryant Street Gallery in Palo Alto, an event tracing the influence of CryptoPunks on digital art across Asia.Its work is also credited in “Collecting Art Onchain”, a 2025 book and NFT project pairing interviews with web3 collectors and 137 artists to document a decade of blockchain-based art history.,