There are many projects by the prolific contemporary artist Mel Chin that could have been included here. For a few decades now, his projects have constantly found new ways to pry at our understanding and expectation for how art should be made, how it should look, or how it should behave. The inter-connected projects Operation Paydirt and Fundred Dollar Project are being featured here not because they may be his most current work, but because they may be his most ambitious and complex work to date in sheer scale and breadth and in the number of questions they pose about an artist’s capacity to solve social problems through a service-based art practice.