Qian Qian is a New York-based artist and graphic designer with two decades of experience in advertising and design, having created award-winning work for brands including Samsung, Nike, Coca-Cola and Google. He is the creative director of Bright Moments gallery and the artist behind its ongoing generative art collection CryptoCitizens.
Qian Qian first drew and animated pixel art during graduate studies in media arts in the UK, and has described the form as “Bauhaus meets Impressionism”, combining the precision of geometric design with the freedom of figurative drawing.During the Covid-19 pandemic he began sharing small, minimal pixel-art pieces on Instagram, which caught the attention of Bright Moments founder Seth Goldstein, who invited him to design the gallery's first NFT project. The result, CryptoVenetians (2021), modeled on Larva Labs's CryptoPunks and minted on Art Blocks, was released through live-minting events at Bright Moments' gallery in Venice, where visitors generated their own unique character in front of an audience.
CryptoCitizens, the generative portrait collection that grew out of that project, went on to mint across nine Bright Moments cities before reaching its full run of 10,000 citizens.Qian Qian's work has been exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and Lincoln Center in New York, and featured by Apple.He later designed the logo and other visual elements for NODE, a nonprofit gallery in Palo Alto founded by Micky Malka and Becky Kleiner.For NODE's inaugural exhibition, “10,000”, curated by Amanda Schmitt and produced by Natalie Stone, he worked alongside Larva Labs on the exhibition design that presented the complete CryptoPunks collection in its natively digital form for the first time.In 2023 he showed new pixel-art work, Full Moon Fever, in “The Pixel Generation” at Unit London, alongside artists including eBoy, LoVid and Peter Burr.,