Foodmasku

Foodmasku (real name Antonius Oki Wiriadjaja) is a multidisciplinary artist of Indonesian origin living in the United States whose work is at the intersection of performance, photography and digital art. Known for his famous masks made from his daily meals, which he eats once the camera is off, the artist is one of the most recognized performers in the web3 space. The artist's pseudonym is a play on words taken from two languages: “food", food in English and “mas ku", my next in Indonesian. This nickname allowed the artist to act anonymously, cultivating the secret of his dual artistic identity, even among the closest members of his family, to whom he would only reveal it in 2022.

The idea of photographing one's meals surfaced during the pandemic, acting as a joyful way to overcome the collective trauma of our days spent behind hygienic masks. One evening in April 2020, one of her colleagues found herself embarrassed during a video conference, because she was unable to deactivate the filter on her computer which transformed her facial features into a pickle. The artist, overcome with empathy, grabs his meal of kale salad and attaches it to his face in an attempt to distract the other participants in the call and draw attention away from his colleague . Thus, what began as a playful act transformed into a long-term artistic performance, when Foodmasku, taking part in the game, transformed its meals into a mask daily throughout the duration of the New York City lockdown.

During this period of confinement, Foodmasku gained popularity on social networks, his art went viral and exceeded 5 million views. The mainstream media as well as specialized publications took up the subject, the New York Times then considered him “one of the 5 artistic accounts to follow" while Artnet gave him the status of favorite artist on Instagram. This new celebrity means that he is regularly dispossessed of his work by third parties looking for attractive content to publish on social networks. Faced with the challenge of not being able to exercise his right of authorship of his work, the artist is looking for a way to prove. effectively that he is the owner of his digital file. This is how Foodmasku, following a Google search, discovered the concept of NFTs. This fame has led to it being stolen by people looking for attractive content. In March 2021, Foodmasku published its first work on the blockchain which met with immediate success. His works are then collected by artists, collectors and even entrepreneurs respected in the web3 space, such as Kevin Abosch, Sia and Kevin Rose. His artistic work appears during the same period on the front pages of the main NFT marketplaces, thus illustrating the impact of his work on this ecosystem. Antonius, far from being a simple photographic artist, is also a technologist. This visionary is at the origin of the first generative art collection based on photography. Using JavaScript and CSS, the artist and his team were able to generate thousands of photorealistic images, then monetize them on the blockchain.

An Indonesian artist living in New York, Foodmasku survived a shooting, this traumatic experience made him a fervent activist opposed to gun rights in the United States. The works of art born following this violent ordeal also met with great critical success. The artist, familiar with repetition, photographed the scars of his bullet wounds daily, until the day of his attacker's trial. His photographs have been published in the New York Post, the New York Times, and Rolling Stone magazine, and he was even selected as "New Yorker of the Week" by NY1.