MERKLE TREE

While Choy is a traditionally trained fine artist, her practice has evolved into new and emerging technologies, most notably blockchain. Since 2021, she has been exploring art as digital artefact through the inscription of her work on the Ethereum blockchain, and more recently traversing the territory into Bitcoin Ordinals. For Choy, blockchain offers a decentralized, immutable canvas—preserving the essence of an artwork, extending its life beyond the physical, and transforming how audiences experience and engage with art.

Gina Choy’s research into Ordinals began with the Merkle Tree. In blockchain technology, Merkle Trees are an essential foundation: they ensure security and efficiency, making decentralized networks like Bitcoin possible. Their invention by Ralph Merkle in 1979 marked a pivotal step toward the emergence of blockchain. 

Merkle Tree (2025) translates Bitcoin’s hashing algorithm, expressed through her pioneering system-based method that draws on traditional Chinese calligraphy. In this painting, Choy constructs the central form of the Merkle Tree using two deliberate brushstrokes, evoking the binary code at the heart of computation. From this core, the structure expands outward into a flourishing pattern of verdant rhythms—thousands of hand-painted Chinese calligraphic strokes. These strokes, drawn from a centuries-old tradition that encodes nature’s principles of order, suggest a primordial algorithm underlying the natural world.

By weaving together contemporary cryptographic structures and ancient modes of expression, Merkle Tree reflects Choy’s exploration of how human technologies mirror the intrinsic li—the underlying truth or pattern—of nature. It positions human creation not as separate from, but as a multitemporal echo of the natural order and its constant principles.