Grant Yun

Grant Yun, also credited as Grant Riven Yun, is an American digital artist born in 1996 in San Jose, California, and now based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He is of Korean heritage, and his American-Korean identity is a recurring subject in his work, most explicitly in the 2024 exhibition Growing Up.

He has no formal training in art or art history. He has said in interviews that he has never taken an art class and taught himself digital illustration without tutorials. His academic path ran instead through science and medicine: he earned a B.S. with Honors from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 2018, and went on to study at the Medical College of Wisconsin as an M.D. candidate, with an expected completion date around 2024. By 2026 his own professional profile lists him as Grant Yun, MD, suggesting he has since completed his medical training, though an exact conferral date is not confirmed in available sources. He has continued to make and sell art throughout his medical training. Several profiles describe him also as a breakdancer.

Yun's rise in the NFT art market accelerated in 2022, when primary sales including A Quiet Day in the Neighborhood and Marble Quarry were followed by a much larger secondary sale of his piece The Alien. Sotheby's later featured his work The Last Supper as the sole NFT in a Contemporary Curated sale, and he has shown or sold through Christie's, Sotheby's, SuperRare, and Avant Arte. According to the artist's own account and local coverage, the newly opened Museum of Art & Light in Manhattan, Kansas included him in a 2024 group exhibition of digital artists, and two of his works entered the museum's permanent collection by donation; this has not been independently corroborated in major press. His 2024 solo show Growing Up, staged with Soft Corner Gallery and Avant Arte in Seoul, and his 2025 solo show Spaces, staged with Fellowship in London, extended his work from screen-based NFTs into gallery-scale presentation. He continues to live in Milwaukee and to work in parallel as an artist alongside his medical career.

Coverage of Yun centers on his position at the intersection of digital art, major auction houses, and, more recently, museum collecting, alongside his unusual dual career as an artist and physician in training. Whitewall covered his 2025 London exhibition Spaces at Fellowship, framing it as an extension of his visual language into a deeper meditation on memory, history, and digital tools. His work has also been exhibited and used in a collaborative postcard project with the Museum of Modern Art in New York, though available sources confirm that relationship as an exhibition and collaboration rather than a permanent-collection acquisition. Writers consistently frame him as a leading younger voice in NFT and digital art, citing his Precisionist-influenced compositions of landscape and architecture and his exploration of Korean-American identity as distinguishing features within a crowded field.

Yun's market has developed almost entirely on and around NFT platforms rather than through a conventional auction history. The highest figure identified for his work is 136.9 ETH, reported for a secondary-market sale of The Alien on July 28, 2022, equivalent to roughly USD 236,000 at the time of sale; the specific marketplace that hosted the sale is not identified in available sources, so the venue should be treated as unconfirmed. Other notable results include Marble Quarry at 69.69 ETH in a 2022 primary sale, and The Last Supper, which Sotheby's featured as the sole NFT in a Contemporary Curated sale; the realized price for that lot is not confirmed in available sources. Individual primary sales of his 1/1 works have also traded in the low tens of thousands of dollars. Because most of his transaction history is denominated in ether, dollar values for his market move with cryptocurrency prices as well as with demand for the work itself.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Yun, and given the nature of his practice, authenticity is established primarily through on-chain minting records and the specific platform or house that handled a sale, rather than through a traditional certificate program. His gallery relationships, with AOTM Gallery, Fellowship in London, and Soft Corner Gallery with Avant Arte in Seoul, function as active exhibition and sales partnerships rather than a confirmed, exclusive representation arrangement. His transaction history is short, concentrated in 2022 to 2025, and weighted toward NFT platforms and a small number of auction-house placements, which means collectors should treat any single reported price, including his reported auction high, as provisional pending clearer public documentation of the sale venue.