Bitcoin Asia 2025 will present a museum-level exhibition in Hong Kong that will combine digital and physical works on value, code, and property — “from bytes to brushstrokes.”
According to the press release, the event demonstrates how bitcoin is affecting not only global finance but also culture.
The event organizers named British artist and author Robert Alice, whose works explore the philosophical and historical foundations of the blockchain, as the main participant of the exhibition. Hong Kong will show two paintings from his Portraits of a Mind series, a 40-part cycle that encodes the first 12.3 million characters of the bitcoin code.
The statement noted that Alice’s works have already been exhibited at Christie’s Art Tech Summit and will be presented at a special bitcoin auction at Christie’s in September, where a rare early issue of Bitcoin Magazine will also be shown. His works are held in the permanent collections of the Centre Pompidou, LACMA, and Monnaie de Paris.
The event will also feature a fireside chat between former Sotheby’s CEO Ted Smith and Swiss diplomat and collector of contemporary Chinese art Dr Uli Sieg. The two will discuss the future of collecting, cultural diplomacy, and new models of art appreciation, the press release said.
According to the event’s representatives, the exhibition will bring together more than a dozen international artists from Hong Kong, Japan, Spain, Germany, the UK, and the US.
For the first time in Asia, a large LED installation and a physical gallery with works available at fixed prices or at auctions will be presented simultaneously. All sales will be made exclusively in bitcoin, the event organizers said.
Among the highlighted works is a new installation by Harvard professor Scott Kominers from his Pidentities series, which explores mathematics, identity, and origins. The project, which started on Ethereum, will now make its debut at Ordinals, embodying the infinite digits of the number π on the bitcoin blockchain, according to a press release.
The exhibition will also feature some of Ordinals’ most famous collections, such as OnChainMonkey and Bitcoin Puppets, highlighting the expanding cultural movement around bitcoin, the team said.
At the same time, according to the event’s representatives, the exhibition takes place against the backdrop of the global art market transformation. In 2024, global art sales fell by 27% to $10.2 billion, and in 2025, the decline continues: another minus 16% year-on-year.
Major art fairs, including The Art Show in New York and Taipei Dangdai, have announced “pauses” due to high costs and declining demand. Instead, bitcoin sales have already exceeded 100 BTC since 2019, and an increasing number of collectors are switching to digital formats.
The organizers emphasised that Michael Saylor’s words take on special significance against this background:

