Orange Cube Presents: Amir H. Fallah

This week I had the opportunity to speak with Amir H. Fallah, the established multi-disciplinary artist known for exploring systems of representation. In our interview he was forthcoming about his inspirations and motivations as an artist.

As a teenager in D.C., Amir was drawn to the underground graffiti scene, before attending the Maryland Institute College of Art to study painting. One of his artistic inspirations was the artist Barry McGee who is a seminal street artist and founder of the Mission Street art movement.

At the age of 22, Amir was accepted into the MFA program for drawing and painting at UCLA in California, one of the most selective graduate programs for the study of Art. While his early work was well received, he told me that at the time he didn’t fully understand ‘why’ his work was ‘working’ and his art controlled him rather than him guiding his own art.

Beautiful/Decay and the Pivot to Full-Time Artist

During this time, and in the years after, he had success with his renowned underground art magazine Beautiful/Decay. This magazine started when Amir was in highschool, printing black and white zines for 0.70 cents a pop, and selling them for $1.50... before setting aside the project during his collegiate schooling. During college Fallah re-started the magazine, which took off as a unique combination of thoughtful writing with underground flair. As Beautiful/Decay grew, Amir H. Fallah launched a clothing line, and had seven employees crafting each edition.

From graduating UCLA in 2005, until around 2013, the magazine become a huge part of Amir’s life- to the point where he had become recognized more as a publisher than an artist. Being known as a publisher never sat right with him, and as the social media boom began to impact the magazine, he closed Beautiful/Decay’s doors and pivoted to being a full-time artist.

Exploring Portraiture and the NFT Space

As he transitioned to personal work, Amir found his calling in the exploration of Portraiture. Portraiture is one of the oldest and most explored artistic traditions, and Amir set out to challenge and expand it. This monumental undertaking was set aloft by the strange and experimental work found in his roaming of the city streets as he created and explored underground street art.

With portraiture, he found a medium to explore identity, social issues, and the current moment. In this, his aim was simple: flip portraiture on its head. He is a fervent researcher, and has always been an avid student of identity and people- preferring non-fiction to fiction. Amir deeply studies his subjects and crafts work that can be exceptionally attuned to both exposing and expressing their unique qualities. He views himself as a seeker of the outskirts of culture, stating that “Real artists are open.”

From this mindset, in early 2021 Amir found his way onto SuperRare and began his journey into the NFT space. His practice has always involved digital preparation before physical painting, and now with a digital-native medium he was able to explore new concepts. His SuperRare genesis ‘Immortal’, selling for 24 Eth, was a video in which the physical painting he created was burned. Thus making the digital work something that lived, and not a ghost. When Orange Cube approached Amir about Ordinals, he was quick to understand the unique value of inscriptions and developed a creative series to explore human thought on the protocol. He calls this series “Thought Ledger” and has written the following as to its intent.

Thought Ledger

Memory is a ledger. Perception is a blockchain.

Thought Ledger explores the indelibility of human perception through a series of Rorschach collages inscribed on the Bitcoin blockchain. These works layer multiple Rorschach inkblots on top of one another, creating new and unexpected patterns. Like our memories and thoughts, these images overlap, merge, and influence each other, forming something simultaneously familiar and alien. The inkblots never disappear—they fade, transform, and integrate into the whole, much like the subconscious mind itself.

Bitcoin, as the ultimate immutable memory system, mirrors the mind's own inability to forget certain images, impressions, and moments. Just as the blockchain resists alteration, our minds harbor the unshakeable permanence of experiences, interpretations, and traumas. Each Rorschach inscribed within this project is both an artifact and a provocation—an invitation to interpret, knowing that your gaze, your perception, is forever tied to this digital object.

In anchoring these layered images on Bitcoin, Thought Ledger transforms fleeting moments of subjectivity into eternal markers of collective experience. The works embrace the complexity of layered perception, where thoughts do not exist in isolation but continually inform and shape one another. Viewers, owners, and participants contribute to an unerasable dialogue—one where interpretation becomes legacy.

This project challenges the contemporary NFT landscape—an ecosystem often obsessed with speculation and impermanence—by leveraging Bitcoin’s permanence as a conceptual medium. The question of value shifts: what is the worth of a memory that cannot be erased, an interpretation that cannot be undone?