Fireside Chat on the Global NFT Space| 10th May 2022 Recording
Ms Visithra Mankiam; Malaysian NFT Artist, Creator of Visithra
With
Ms Julia Chartlon; Chairman of the Commonwealth Chamber of Commerce
Visithra Manikam is a self-taught Malaysian woman visual artist from Malaysia. She paints both expressionism and pop art/surrealism in the modern Indian art style and creates sculptures. She is a verified NFT artist in OpenSea with 102 ETH volume traded for her collection – Visithra. Her art focuses on human behaviour and experiences which she explores through psychology, eastern philosophy and symbolism. She also focuses on subjects such as racism, colourism, feminism and social issues. She had her first NFT exhibition in New York in September 2021, followed by 2 NFT exhibitions in Los Angeles, Mumbai and soon in Liverpool, UK. She is a speaker at NFT NYC 2022.
In this fireside chat, Visithra Manikam shared the inspirational story of her perseverance during the COVID-19 pandemic that led to her discovery of the global NFT space in September of 2020. NFTs first came into being in 2014 however it was not until 2021 that NFTs really began to uptrend due to the Bitcoin and Ethereum (ETH) bull run as well as the uptake of NFTs by famous personalities all around the world. This consequently led to a 38,000% year-over-year increase in NFT sales and increased the value of the NFT marketplace to almost US$41 billion; almost at par with the US$50 billion procured by the conventional art and antique sales of 2020. This highlights the strong impact NFTs have had on the realm of art as many artists have begun transforming their traditional artworks to NFTs, creating a bustling, vibrant online community on platforms including OpenSea and Blockparty where artists showcase their individual works and also collaborate with other artists for collector series NFTs.
Visithra explained in detail how the online NFT community that operates mainly on Twitter, provides her a great sense of belonging and acceptance, something which she felt was lacking from the traditional art community of Malaysia. She described to us her difficulty in grasping the concept of NFTs and how her online community of friends supported and encouraged her to not give up her pursuit of understanding the realm. Ultimately, Visithra’s hard work has materialized in the form of impressive achievements; she is the best selling Malaysian NFT artist on OpenSea and her art is now collected globally with over 230 collectors including The Medici Collection which is now owned by Snoop Dogg. During the webinar, the Commonwealth Chamber and Visithra also delved into the specifics of what NFTs are and how they are manage and stored as well as the legal aspects and other such issues that arise for the relatively new phenomenon of digital NFT trade.
Watch the full recording now with instant playback here.