My Kawaii Valentine celebrates love in the form of an NFT

Love is in the air! Philips, a British auction house, is also celebrating the season of love across the metaverse by running a themed online sale called My Kawaii Valentine that is inspired by the Japanese culture of kawaii — which essentially means cute — across Valentine’s Day in the West and Lantern Festival in Asia.

The word kawaii also draws attention to a kind of cuteness that softens the heart. The culture expounds the philosophy that “in order to find true love, one must first learn to love oneself from within.”

The British auction house is offering works that explore the themes of kawaii, companionship, self-appreciation and sexuality, and some flowers were included throughout the week. The works are by contemporary artists including Katherine Bernhardt, Edgar Plans, Gina Beavers, Julian Opie, Javier Calleja, Ayako Rokkaku, Damien Hirst, Mr. Doodle and Takashi Murakami, delivered alongside a series of NFT artworks.

The highlight of My Kawaii Valentine would be MonoC, a virtual human who is programmed to think, act and even feel like a human being, via her first generative artwork called Drowning in Love. In the ongoing journey of her understanding love and feeling love, MonoC has created a dreamy, abstract and immersive experience showcasing what the power of love can have on our lives. Drowning in Love will be created in part by real-time data drawn from the auction, and then the art collectors will determine the final form of the work where the virtual human would be responding to the participation of bidders in the auction to procedurally generate melodies and animations within pre-programmed parameters.

Conceptual artist Maciej Kuciara has helped produce concept art for the movie Ghost in the Shell, the game series The Last of Us and The Avengers movie series is also participating in the auction. This time around, the artist has picked the second NFT Her Body is Metal from his long-form narrative series Showtime Universe which is about a highly cybernetic vision of the future.

My Kawaii Valentine’s online auction will be held from February 14 to February 22 and you can know more about the auction here.