Nikolai Syadristy

The Chess men

- A tiny chessboard is placed on a pinhead. The piece arrangement is taken from a game between Alexander Aliokhin (black) and Raul Capablanca (white), for the 1927 world championship. The chessmen are made of gold.

Ukrainian Nikolai Syadristy is only a microminiature artist part time; when he's not creating ridiculously fucking small pieces of art, which is only a hobby, he's an underwater athlete. That's just absurd.



This book is probably my favourite of his works-- it has twelve functioning pages, which feature poetry that a viewer can actually read (with the help of a microscope, obviously). This book is the smallest in the world, which just makes it adorable, and is only 0.6 square millimeters.


Taken from his book, Mysteries of Microtechnology: "Microminiatures to a great extent reflect the attained level of treatment for various materials and, consequently, the degree of comprehension of their properties; they vividly narrate on the culture of human labour, thus, they actually dwell on the culture of human thinking."

Apparently the process is so absolutely intricate that Syadristy has to work between heartbeats and hold his breath as he works.

The Meeting

A jug, two wineglasses, a tray and an apple are placed on a sugar grain, although in complaint, a sugar grain is a fairly monumental surface so I demand the table to be set for four before I'm going to be impressed.