The VICE Guide to Right Now

Bread Art Is Indonesia’s Most Viral Quarantine Activity

This is what happens when you’re stuck at home with way too much time to kill.
JP
translated by Jade Poa
Indonesia, bread art, quarantine, coronavirus
Collage of bread art. (L) Photo via @HILLARY2212. (R) Photo via @PUTUWARDHANI

This article originally appeared on VICE Indonesia.

It’s truly amazing what people can achieve out of boredom. In Indonesia, it looks like Dalgona coffee has an unexpected new contender: mixed-media art on slices of bread.

For the past week, Indonesian netizens have been sharing their masterpieces of white bread meticulously decorated with chocolate sprinkles, a popular bread topping in Indonesia. Some have crafted intricate patterns, while others have taken a stab at depicting faces.

Advertisement

Twitter user @excelalkamandka first sparked interest in this project on April 18, inspiring countless other netizens to try their hands at painstakingly arranging minuscule chocolate sprinkles to form bonafide works of art.

Some netizens decided to one-up @excelalkamandka’s iteration, which was far from perfect, and posted upgraded versions of the bread art. Eventually, other netizens got creative, adding their own twists and creating their own designs in a similar fashion. One version even received over 62,000 likes on Twitter.

Some netizens decided that they could do better than uniformed, symmetrical patterns and branched out to different shapes and faces, including the faces of healthcare workers who lost their lives on the frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic. Netizens also began experimenting with other food like eggs, string cheese, and multi-coloured sprinkles.

Indonesian transportation giant Go-Jek also jumped on the bandwagon, tweeting an image of their logo consisting of carefully-assembled green sprinkles.

With no end in sight to our days locked up at home, we can’t wait to see the next great trend born out of sheer boredom.