Yosca Maeda is a Japanese pixel artist who works under the name mae, building intricate, hand-placed pixel-art scenes that range from nostalgic, emotional landscapes to pop and cute characters.,He describes pixels as “atoms of digital light”, connecting them one at a time to trace inner feelings and fragments of memory rather than to render a finished picture.
Maeda has previously worked as an elementary school teacher, an experience he has said left him with a lasting commitment to being an ally to children and to those without a place to belong. His Drools & Pixels project applies a related sensibility to a collection of 32x32 pixel-art characters called Drools, whose parts are compressed with run-length encoding and stored fully on the Ethereum blockchain in the manner pioneered by Nouns DAO.In 2024 Maeda held the solo exhibition “Afterglows” at NEORT++ in Tokyo, pairing LED displays with interactive screen-based works that let visitors turn a physical dial to lower the resolution of his looping animations. He has said the turning motion was inspired by music boxes and wind-up toys, giving viewers a physical way to rewind his work toward an 8-bit register of memory. Works shown in the exhibition included Afterglow, Light in Passing, Rainy Day Ghost and Plankton_Always, all made in 2024.
Right Click Save's 2023 survey of Japan's NFT scene named Maeda among a small group of pixel artists, including Hermippe, Kazuki Takakura and the collective Excalibur, who had engaged with NFTs early on.In January 2026 his work was shown alongside Larva Labs, PIV, Excalibur and Bright Moments in “Onchain Harmony: Punks & Pixels” at Bryant Street Gallery in Palo Alto, an event tracing the influence of CryptoPunks on Japan's pixel-art movement.
