New Blood Art: The Story - Part 5

London 2000

Fast forward two years and I’m back from Botswana, staying with my parents in London and supply teaching - in that quiet space between what was and what’s next.

One afternoon my dad took me to PC World and under the store’s bright lights, stacked with beige machines and boxed-up function, we found the original Apple iMac. Not the bright, candy-coloured ones. The graphite one - looking like a piece of sculpture - translucent, smoky, storm-glass grey. It didn’t belong there. But it was there.

Honestly, it felt a bit religious.

There had been something about that moment in PC World. I knew it, even then. It carried something. A presence, a parting, a beginning.

I set it up in their dining room. This wasn’t the house I’d grown up in - my parents had downsized after I finished university - but they’d done something quietly sweet and fitted a small bathroom into what was now my room for me to return to - which gave me a bit of self-containment. A soft landing, even if it was only a pitstop.

That smoky quartz Time Machine became more than a computer. It pulled me in, and something began. Photoshop. The early internet. And that idea - the one that had been circling quietly since art college, faithfully orbiting from a distance. Late nights. Soft light.

A spell reactivating itself.

It was there again, the idea that never quite fitted..

Until now.

That smoky, translucent object held something like a message. Almost prophetic. Two years later, and my dad would be gone. And not long after that, I’d start an internet company on that strange, sculptural piece we’d chosen together - part computer, part storm-lit oracle.

Just me and my smoky quartz Time Machine. It was pioneering - it was tiny, instinctive, accidental almost. And still, one of the first.

And.. I’m not sure that I can explain this.. (or if I even need to) - but years later I was in Paris, wandering through the Pompidou, when something quietly extraordinary happened.

There it was. My iMac. The smoky quartz one I’d bought with my dad in PC World. Now behind glass, in a display cabinet - a piece of art. I stood there thinking - sorry, what is my computer doing here?

Who let it in?

The object I’d started an online art gallery on – now an exhibit at the Pompidou… I had to do a small double take. (Possibly a triple.) Thankfully I wasn’t holding a coffee. I saw the word: icon. It was part of a design icon exhibition. And for a moment, that word and a timeline all aligned – beginnings, endings, prophecy, presence, permanence – the non-linear nature of time folding in on itself.

Standing there in Paris, faced with this strange, exact object from my past, something important and unseen acknowledged me. It was as if life itself – or my dad, perhaps – was saying: I see what you did with the machine we bought that day together, in the space between worlds – you put a gallery in it. 🙃

In PC World. It had started before it started.

When I saw Luo-Han Chen’s paintings, I felt the same quiet jolt I’d felt years ago, standing in the Pompidou in front of my iMac - the graphite one I’d bought with my dad in PC World. Something strange and circular happened. The image met the memory. The object met the afterimage. And I understood that these paintings had to sit beside that part of the story.

There’s a kind of echo in Chen’s work - the same way something stays with you even after it’s gone. A form hovering in the dark. A presence that doesn’t need to be explained. When I wrote about that smoky quartz machine - part computer, part oracle - I was trying to name something that had started before it started. Chen’s work does that too. You look, and then you keep looking — even when your eyes have moved on.

The figures drift, like jellyfish in space - indistinct but certain. It’s the same feeling I had back then: suspended between past and future, back from Botswana, not yet knowing what I was making - only that something was pulling me forward through the blur.

And now here we are. The paintings and the story, the girl and the gallery, the machine behind glass. I think what I’m trying to say is: this was always more than technology, more than art. It was about presence. Timing. Seeing the image emerge from the undefined.

And knowing - somehow - to follow it.

That’s how it speaks to me. But art doesn’t land in one place - it moves through each of us differently. You’ll have your own cosmic connections, your own afterimages - the objects that stayed long after they left, the forms that held a message only you could decode.

This is the power of art. It doesn’t explain. It resonates.

And when it finds you - it knows exactly where to land.

If I needed another sign. You won’t believe it - but I chose a grey for the background of the Instagram caption. Storm grey. Something that felt like dusk or memory. I went to check the hex code. It was #DADADA. The colour of the caption. The ghost tone beneath the text. The one who saw it too. You can’t make it up. But then again - maybe that’s the point. That’s the oracle. Right there.

And then the word stuck: hex. It means a spell, a curse, something cast. But in design, it’s also a colour code. This one – #DADADA – sits between memory and fog. It’s not coincidence. It’s language folding in on itself. Hex as omen, hex as tone. Both kinds are real.

And then, in real time, I get an email from Luo-Han.

When I reached Part 5 and came across Night Atlas: Page V (Lightseeker Fragment No.19), I was gently startled. The mention came softly, folded into a sentence - but it felt like a moment of mutual recognition, not because my work appeared in your writing, but because the way you see aligns so closely with how these images were made. What moved me most was not that you’ve built a space for art, but that you’ve built it by listening - to silences, to beginnings that weren’t grand, to gestures that might easily be missed. Luo-Han Chen

Back to blog