The genesis of the Chivas’ ‘I Rise We Rise’ pop up at 150 Tyrwhitt Road is simple: how does the Scotch whisky brand propel itself into the future? It celebrates everything of the now. It looks towards the future of drinking (each of the new Chivas12 bottles is made from 100% environmentally-friendly packaging), taps into technology (Jonathan Liu of NFT Asia pictured above has an artwork displayed and is speaking at a panel come Saturday) and lastly, it brings back something we lost in recent years. Having a good time.
Photo credit above, Lenne Chai
The pop up runs till 18th May and like all good times, is free. Click here to register.
Here, Jonathan Liu of NFT Asia talks to us about the platform, the collaboration, and the future of NFTS themselves.
Hi Jonathan, how’s it going?
Hey Bryan, I’m doing well thanks! Just recently wrapped up a semester of teaching at Lasalle and work in general’s been keeping me busy!
View this post on Instagram
How did the idea for NFT Asia come about? What was the “lightning strike” moment?
It was definitely a slow burn rather than a lightning strike, Clara Peh, curator and art lead at Appetite, founded NFT Asia in March 2021. It all started with Clara, who at the time was writing an article about NFTs for Art & Market and she approached me while doing her research about artists in Singapore who worked with NFTs, or those who were actively interested in it.
This led her to speak to Myself, Ernest Wu, Speak Cryptic and Shavonne Wong. She initially suggested we start a group chat to just talk about NFTs amongst ourselves but we ended up deciding with a discord channel instead. Over the next couple of weeks we realised that there were many creatives and artists regionally in Asia who wanted to talk about the technology and also to learn about them together.
We opened the Discord channel up to public and here we are almost 14 months later with 4000 members on discord and a following of almost 15,000 on Twitter.
If you could somehow elevator pitch NFT Asia in 10 words, what’d you say then?
We are a community-driven channel aiming to uplift Asian NFT Creators.
The NFT Gallery at the pop-up features artworks by Jonathan Liu of NFT Asia himself and other artits like MOJOKO, Kristal Melson, Aundraj Jude and O$P$.
What made you take up this Chivas project? What was perhaps, a part of the brief that made you think it was a project worth taking up?
I was drawn to their focus of wanting to create this opportunity to feature artists who work with NFTs, as opposed to featuring NFT Collectible projects etc which is jumping onto some sort of a hype train.
Funnily enough, your artist statement for layers (“appears fleeting and marked by voids” or even “enormous number of associations leading to the same event”) read like a drinking session. You know, how some of us drink to forget or how some of us create new memories to drink.
One of the reasons why I started working on this series was because I feel like I’ve got terrible memory, these flashes of what should be conscious evidence of my reality feels untrustworthy at best, the prints I’ve created in the darkroom were all printed off of the same film negative but each print was destroyed in various ways through the use of physical and chemical means.
This represented the spectrum of my experience with memory and some of them definitely resembles a night of drinking haha, these fleeting voids a representation of a great time I hope.
How did you imbue this concept of “memory” and Chivas 12 then? Sometimes, something has to give right?
I’m definitely not pushing for things to align here, but there is significance in the focus of legacy and memory here within its branding.
View this post on Instagram
What do you think is the future of NFTs then? I’m sure you’ve seen the WSJ article.
I think it’s tough to surmise the doomed future of NFTs via certain data points and headlines, especially those that are often mixed in with the datasets of collectible sales. I see the use case of NFTs being invisible in the future, merely a tool of commodification of certain digital of physical goods. The problem at the moment is the over-saturation of NFT specific collectible projects that are mainly driven by speculative hype and hopes of profit.
View this post on Instagram
This is unsustainable and a distraction to what the underlying technology of NFTs can allow independent artists and other sectors to achieve. The future should be an interesting one to watch, and the amazing part about this space is you never can really expect it. I see the potential of this technology to empower creators to make a living, to reach previously unattainable audiences as well as bring together a camaraderie that is sorely missed within the creative and arts community.
I see the experiments being done with creative DAOs (Decentralised Autonomous Organisations) to bring about a more distributed and democratic way of funds or grant distribution within the arts, along with a new way of organisational structure that gives more autonomy for those who chooses to be involved. I’m slightly optimistic that if we have the right people building within the space, we can create a more positive alternative economy for artists and creators alike.
Lastly, out of curiousity, what was the #1 song on your Spotify last year?
Fever by Angèle & Dua Lipa.
RELATED ARTICLES
