Make a new “BFF” and grab one of these delicious food beasts!
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have experienced an explosion in popularity in the past year. Sales volumes for NFTs increased from US$94.9 million in 2020 to US$24.9 billion in 2021. Be it through purchases of Apes or Cryptopunks, people have been actively diving into the NFT trend.
If you are an NFT investor who is bored of these randomly generated characters and are looking for that “human” touch in your next NFT art investment, Beast From Feasts (BFF) might be the exact NFT project you are looking for. The BFF project is the brainchild of artist and branding expert David Leung. To put it simply, these NFTs are beasts created by re-compositing images of food. Curious to know more about this project? Let’s dive in!
From a foodie to an artist
Before becoming an NFT artist, Leung had a long and illustrious career in the field of advertising and branding. “Personally, I am kind of a foodie myself and have always been food hunting (who doesn’t nowadays lol),” he shared on how he got interested in creating content around food.
Leung loves taking close-up shots of the food he would encounter on his travels across Hong Kong, among many other countries. His love for and his experience working closely with food culminated in this project during a family trip to Melbourne. During this trip, he wanted to create something new not only for himself but also for his kids. He had also been experiencing FOMO (fear of missing out) with the rising popularity of the metaverse. All of these factors finally led to the creation of BFFs.
About Beasts From Feasts
The project consists of unique “beasts” handcrafted using the photos Leung took during his travels. “I like to try positioning things a bit different where I still create a range of characters which looks identical as a set yet unique individually, plus more manually curated and crafted,” Leung shared. He compared it to looking at the sky and trying to find faces or familiar shapes within the clouds.
He recreated the features of a face on the food to connect viewers to the art and deliver emotions. “I simply select the right angle, size and cropping to reflect and create the ‘face’, and the more I tried to produce in this (cropping and mirroring) treatment, I found out the organic and deformed features are quite uglicious (ugly+delicious) and almost beast-like.” This beast-like appearance is what prompted him to name the NFTs as “beasts”.
The project will be divided into three volumes of 111 NFTs and is a unique combination of the realism of the food photos with surrealist recreations of faces in said photos. Besides existing as NFTs, the artist plans to recreate the beasts on recycled canvas and as three-dimensional sculptures in the future.
For those of you who are interested in this quirky and creative project, BFF plans to create a Discord server for its NFT holders, which will be a great opportunity for you to get together with other like-minded people and make some friends. For our Hong Kong-based readers, Leung plans on providing exclusive BFF members with a chance to hang out with other beast owners. You will get to dine in at rotations of curated restaurant brands that serve the dishes that inspired the creation of the beasts. So, if you end up purchasing a beast, you would not only be supporting Leung but also the businesses BFF collaborates with.
Raising money to preserve forests
As evidenced by the collaborative spirit of this project, Leung is an ardent believer in giving back to the community. Not only does this project help expand the reach of the food and beverage businesses it collaborates with, but it is also rooted in the desire to preserve global forest cover.
About 2% of the profits from the BFF collection will be contributed to tree planting initiatives by EcoMatcher. All trees planted with the proceeds of the project will be recorded on the blockchain protocol, and each step of the process can be tracked by the beast NFT holders. If you purchase from the first volume of beasts, you can claim the trees with your name on EcoMatcher. The certificate of ownership will be shared with you after the first volume sells out. For each of the three NFT drops, trees will be planted in Thailand, Kenya and Indonesia respectively.
The first volume of NFTs will be up for sale for 0.1 ETH on February 22 at 2PM (HKT) on OpenSea. Leung will also be exhibiting the NFTs starting from February 14 at the Art Now Gallery in Singapore. If you are reading our article after the launch date and end up missing out on the first volume of BFFs, you can always grab a beast from existing owners on OpenSea. Besides, Leung has a lot more in store for BFF fans. To find out more about future projects on BFF’s Discord, Instagram and Twitter.
All images courtesy of Beasts From Feasts
