Money changes everything

WITH MATERIALISM beating down decency’s door at every turn, it’s doubtful that Yosuke Hasegawa is trying to reassure us with humour by folding banknotes into funny hats. In an exhibition at Tadu Contemporary Art that’s more unnerving than amusing, the Japanese pop-art maestro scorns the largely artificial value of money by manipulating it in a way that Big Banking would never consider.

Grabbing fistfuls of cash from various countries, he folds up the bills until all that’s left is the prominent figures portrayed thereon seeming to wear outlandish headgear. Seeing Ben Franklin and Queen Elizabeth wearing baseball caps sideways, their heads perched on slouching sketched bodies dressed in rapper style, tickles the funny bone first. Then it makes you wonder what this business of money is all about anyway.

It’s a bizarre, cynical, laser-poignant spin on origami that Hasegawa calls moneygami.

Most of the faces are familiar enough in this show titled “Moneylicious”. Abraham Lincoln has that calm visage of the US $5 bill, Mahatma Gandhi is at his meekest on the 20-rupee Indian note, and Mao Zedong gazes hopefully at the horizon from China’s one-yuan slip of tender. 

After a few mocking twists from Hasegawa, they and Britain’s queen, America’s $100 hero Franklin, beatified revolutionary Che Guevara (from the Cuban three-peso bill), Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (on multiple Iranian notes) and even Albert Einstein (from an old Israeli five-lirot slip) look far less dignified wearing turbans, sombreros and jaunty sailor caps.

Hasegawa has been bending the currency of various realms since 2006, concocting 205 different folding techniques along the way. He’s actually written two books (in Japanese) on the craft, both quite popular. In the exhibition you can look for a QR code on one of the picture frames that can be scanned with a smartphone. It links to a video on YouTube showing how to fold up the $5 Lincoln so that he looks like he’s wearing a baseball cap.

Hasegawa wisely avoids giving Thai banknotes the same treatment. “Early on I did fold up a Thai note and posted it on my Facebook page, but I quickly learned it was inappropriate and I’ve never done it again. Now I’ve lived in Thailand for two years and I’ve learned how much the King has contributed and why he’s so loved and admired.”

 Americans might argue that the same applies to Lincoln, of course, but Hasegawa sees cash in general as fair game. “I want to question whether money is the top priority in life or not,” 

 he says. “The world has continuously struggled at the mercy of money, through war and the misuse of nuclear power and plenty of incidents when banknotes – which are just a temporary ‘receipt’ for precious metal – lost their value overnight and turned into scrap paper.”

Paper currency represents for Hasegawa an “illusion of peace” cre

 ated by materialistic businesspeople. “But what’s the real meaning of life? That’s the question I ask myself.”

The imagery broadens into three dimensions with a dining table. You can pull up a chair and make a meal of more money – a banknote folded into a dollar sign sits on a plate. On the back of the chair is a canvas bearing the phrase in acrylics “We are all servants of money.”

Watching you eat will be the hip-hop crowd – Queen Elizabeth, Gandhi, Einstein, Che, the ayatollah and the famous Benjamin – in outfits of baggy, low-slung jeans and jerseys rendered in watercolour.

Changing into baseball uniforms for a different group portrait, they’re joined by Mao, Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong-il and others to form a team called the Rookies, celebrating their dubious victory. “The idea is that world leaders are united on the same team,” says Hasegawa.

Chairman Mao’s folded head wears a cowboy hat in a double image based on Andy Warhol’s famous homage to a gun-slinging Elvis Presley.

“Elvis Presley represents the American power that’s now being shaken by China, as symbolised by the portrait of Mao,” says the parodist. “The gun symbolises the difficulty Japan is having today standing between the two major powers.”

You wonder just how much money Hasegawa has gone through in his efforts to denigrate it. “The highest-value banknote I’ve ever used was a 10,000-yen bill with a portrait of Yukichi Fukuzawa, a Meiji-era philosopher. The bills that are easiest to fold are the ones with Lincoln and Gandhi, because their facial proportions can be manipulated into many different shapes. The one with Che Guevara is the hardest to use because the face is large and it’s hard to get a balanced result.”

While Thai paper currency is given a wide berth, Hasegawa has bedecked an actual sam lor trishaw with 50-satang coins, as well as gold leaf. “To me the sam lor symbolises labour because it’s powered by a man, signifying the working class.”

Thai multimedia artist Witaya Junma gives the exhibition an interactive dimension with three video installations interpreting Hasegawa’s work. In “Money Face”, standing at a vertical television screen, your own image appears half-body-length with a random array of Hasegawa’s folded banknote faces superimposed on your head. The resulting images are posted on the “Ngernsod Rodhomwaen” Facebook page (that’s the title of the exhibition in Thai). 

“Banknotes only bear portraits of important figures, but I wanted to insert pictures of ordinary people,” says Witaya, who teaches digital media at Sripatum University and is art director at Bit Studio.

In “Money Town”, Witaya swaps the faces for Hasegawa’s collage of landmarks depicted on banknotes. Your picture amid the famous scenes becomes part of the collage. And in “Mao Flaming Star & Me”, at the pull of a cord, your face replaces Mao’s atop the cowboy Elvis body. Pull it again and the gun “shoots” you.

  

 

 

CASHING OUT

>>The exhibition “Moneylicious” continues until September 5. 

>>Tadu Contemporary Art is on the second floor of the Thaiyarnyon Building at the head of Sukhumvit Soi 87 near the On Nut Skytrain station. It’s open daily except Sunday from 10 to 6. Call (086) 036 0760 or visit the Facebook page.

>>Witaya has his own website – www.WitayaJunma.com.