My Instagram was selected by the New York Times as one of five art accounts to follow. Currently I am minting a KnownOrigin exclusive series of 100 masks made during the first
100 days of the current US presidential administration.
I first started making the food masks while sewing fabric masks for a Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) collective in New York City. It was April 2020 and due to COVID-19 I
was stuck in New York because I couldn’t return to Indonesia to finish a project I started as a Fulbright Scholar.
I was on a video chat with some other artists and someone got on the call wearing a digital pickle face filter. So I put on a piece of kale on my face as a mask and we all started laughing. It was the first time I heard laughter in a month! So I started doing it every day and people started bringing their kids on the call to see me.
My instagram account, @foodmasku, was getting really popular and my friends started to notice that my photos and videos were popping up in Tik Tok, Clubhouse PFP, and even
on Tinder profiles without my knowledge! So I wanted to mint my work on the blockchain to cement my identity with my art. It was a way to claim ownership of my body of work. I posted my genesis piece on Foundation on March 11, 2021 and it sold within 48 hours!
I have met so many amazing people in the NFT world like folks in the Red Lion discord. I have so many more ideas. If only there were more hours in the day! Then I could have more masks for meals. Meanwhile, I’ll focus on finishing the current projects. And I have a generative project I am working on at the moment - the dev team tells me they’ve never seen anything like it before! Plus, with the coming holidays, I am going to make a series of 1/1s called Season’s Eatings.
