Three Wise Monkeys of the 21st Century
See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil…
It happened on one of those endless COVID-era days. Same routines, same walls, same screens. And then it hit me: we were already living in a new reality.
Headphones kept getting more and more “noise-isolated.” But was that really isolation from noise - or from each other? Video content was engineered to trap our attention, feeding us endless scrolls until we lived in a parallel world. Then came the masks. I’m not here to debate right or wrong, but let’s admit it: they silenced us. They made us live the metaphor we once feared.
We mocked politicians for turning a blind eye, for shutting their ears, for staying silent. And yet, somewhere in the chaos, we did exactly the same.
That thought scared me. So much that I rushed to beign my first art installation: Three Wise Monkeys.
Mizaru - See No Evil.
Our phones are glued to our eyes 24/7. And now, VR technology has taken that intimacy even further. We don’t just see - we choose what we see. Its vision narrowed by design.
Kikazaru - Hear No Evil.
There was a time we lived fine without noise-cancelling headphones. In public spaces we respected each other. Now, headphones are a symbol of tuning out, of ignoring the world around us. Yes, I wear them too. But they still feel like a quiet surrender.
Iwazaru - Speak No Evil.
The pandemic reshaped how we use our voices. To speak out - or not to. The debate itself became louder than the words spoken. Silence and speech, each more political than ever before.
So I built a new figure. A reimagined monkey for today. Not carved in wood, but shaped by isolation, technology, and the irony of sending a message to the world from the solitude of my room. Here we have my own “Three Wise Monkeys of the 21st Century”.
And then I took it further. I digitized the work and placed it on the blockchain - an NFT, eternal, untouchable. A piece of the pandemic locked in code, preserved as an infinite product for the future. Not just art, but a mirror of our times, made permanent in the digital ether.