Invite David Christiaan, the artist behind this project, to give an inspiring presentation on the deeper implications and underlying philosophical ideas behind the collection. Partly based on a publication co-authored with Professor Dick Meijer, about the creative process, perception, and the role of play. As an artist, David shares how he engages with and reflects on these phenomena.

“Gold is so metaphorically rich that it almost becomes an abstract category – like goodness, beauty, or truth.” The properties of gold reach far beyond its reputation as sound money and a reliable store of value. We cherish gold not merely for its material virtues, but for its deep metaphysical resonance. It functions as a bridge between the physical and the transcendent—an earthly element that gestures toward higher categories such as Goodness, Truth, and Beauty.

Gold serves as something we can aim at, an orienting ideal. To aim at gold is to aim at the highest: at purity, at incorruptibility, at value that cannot be diminished by time or circumstance. It offers us a direction, a position to strive toward. In this sense, gold becomes more than a metal; it becomes a moral and metaphysical compass. Gold is unique among symbolic ideals because it is both tangible and transcendent. We can hold it in our hands, yet its weight can be experienced beyond the physical, if we appreciate its symbolic value as well. Perhaps this is why some people fail to grasp gold’s importance as a monetary element. Could it be that those who dismiss it overlook the depth of human symbolic life itself? For human beings are not merely economic actors, we are meaning-seeking creatures, in a world of symbols that shape our values, our aims, and our highest intuitions. To understand gold is, in part, to understand this symbolic dimension of our nature.

A key idea in the presentation is that perception is not passive—we actively shape how we see the world through attention, experience, and context. What we focus on determines what we notice, what we value, and ultimately, how we experience reality. This leads to a powerful insight: our orientation in the world is not fixed, but a living process—an ongoing dance between awareness and action, between being an observer and being a participant.