Artist Who Conquered Orbit: How Poet Vasily Popov Sent His Art to Space!

2026-02-17 - 14:03

The name of the artist and poet Vasily Popov is already inscribed in the history of contemporary art as a pioneer. A laureate of many prestigious awards in the fields of culture and art, he became the first artist in the world whose NFT painting traveled to space. This event, as if taken from the pages of a science fiction novel, organically combined three passions of the author: poetry, space, and digital technologies. Vasily is a poet and artist whose poems and paintings are written not with ink and paints, but with the trajectories of satellites, asteroids, comets, and recorded not on paper, but in the timeless digital ledger of the Universe. He reminds us that even in a world of data and algorithms, the main plot remains the human aspiration for the transcendent, to leave one's mark—whether in the blockchain or in space—and find authenticity in it. «Entities»: when poems take form In 2021, on the wave of the NFT boom, Vasily Popov discovered a new facet in himself—a digital artist. Although he always made sketches in the margins of manuscripts and painted pictures, it was the digital environment that allowed his images to gain an independent new life. Thus, the collection «Entities Meta» was born. The artist himself calls his works "images that come like flashes," and defines his direction in the NFT industry as "expressive-naive art." This unique combination of spontaneity, deep inner world, and modern technologies quickly found its audience. The flight of the painting to the ISS The main project that made Popov famous in the world and far beyond literary circles was sending his painting to space. The idea was born in 2021. On March 18, 2022, the Soyuz MS-21 spacecraft launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. On board with the crew was also Vasily Popov's art object. The painting spent six months on the International Space Station. This project became a true bridge between earthly and extraterrestrial. Upon returning to Earth, the "Space" painting became the center of the "Art of the Possible" exhibition at the Central Museum of Communications in St. Petersburg. The exposition, consisting of 16 paintings, was an attempt to comprehend the boundless creative and scientific potential of man in the world of high technologies. A true poet and artist knows how to listen to the world and enter into dialogue with it. Popov makes the Universe itself a co-author of his works. His NFT work "Space" is not a painting about space, but a painting that has been to space—this is a deep poetic metaphor: art as a living organism that can be sent on a pilgrimage so that it returns transformed, bearing invisible traces of infinity. Perhaps that's why Vasily strives to meet people of modernity who see a great future in space—so he met Elon Musk in Indonesia, shook his hand, and gave him a video of the painting's flight into space. Popov explores what memory and soul are in the digital age. By sending an NFT into space and returning it, he performs a rite of initiation for the digital object. This process resembles ancient rituals when objects were endowed with power by sending them to sacred places. His works become relics of the new time, where proof of the miracle is not faith, but a cryptographic signature in the blockchain and a photo from the ISS. He creates a new mythology where value is born not from the rarity of pixels, but from the uniqueness and verifiability of the experience lived by the object. World Poetry Garden - as a synthesis of arts Today, Vasily Popov continues to work at the intersection of poetry, painting, and high technologies. In 2024, his "Entities Meta" collection, from which the "Space" painting flew to real space, was recognized as the "Best NFT Collection" according to Crypto Awards. But the author looks even further and wider. He dreams of creating the «World Poetry Garden»—a physical space where, with the help of digital technologies, the memory of great poets from all over the world will be immortalized. In this garden, each tree will be assigned the name of a classic, and visitors will be able to listen to poems while walking along thematic alleys—of love, nature, or philosophy. This will become the ideal embodiment of his creative method, where nature, poetry, and innovation merge into one. Vasily Popov, one of the first artists, proved that in the first quarter of the 21st century, digital art knows no boundaries—neither geographical nor physical. He showed that poems can live not only in books, but also in the blockchain, and paintings can plow the expanses of the Universe, opening new horizons of beauty to humanity.