INTRODUCTION (William Reynaldi SOLICHIN, 53403619): Money has been known as a value of transaction, a medium of exchange between something valuable. The society thinks without money it is useless to live in this world. However, Vincent Austin Wu and I, William Reynaldi Solichin believe that money is a form of art used as values, and because of this inspiration, we are trying to make different forms of values, such as leaves, in which the nature has given itself, shown in the figure below, of different forms of leaves, where many people ignored it on daily basis. This project is inspired through the process of several artists, including J. S. G. Boggs, Scott Campbell, and even Gavin Turks. The inspiration through which we are doing this project is how the rich society in Indonesia insult lower society by a sarcasm of “How are you going to pay, with leaves?” and we are trying to change the value of money through this process to make the rich society in Indonesia rethink the value of money, that it is a form of art as leaf is.

HISTORY (Vincent Austin WU, 53277727): In Indonesia, there is a running joke about using leaves as money. The joke can be uttered in a situation where one wishes to buy something but doesn’t have enough money for it. One would say, “You don’t have enough money! How are you going to pay for it? With leaves?” The origin of “using leaves as money” comes from an advertisement of a cellular network company in Indonesia. In the advertisement, it is stated that the calling rate for using their service is so cheap that they might as well use leaves to pay for the call. This may imply that leaves are “worthless”, but that doesn’t eliminate the fact that it does consider leaves as “money”.

This whole “using leaves as money” thing may be considered as a metaphor, because as we know, “money does not grow on trees.” Or is it? Lorenzo Duran Silva is an artist known for making art out of leaves. He was inspired to make leaf art after he watched a caterpillar making holes in a leaf by eating it.

1. One of the leaf artworks by Lorenzo Duran Silva.

Creating the artwork can take from 1 week to 2 months to finish, and the artwork can be sold for as much as £2,400. So, with that in mind, money can “grow on trees”. PROCESS OF ARTWORK: Inspiration by Scott Campbell (William Reynaldi SOLICHIN, 53403619):

I will describe the process in which the artwork is created through the inspiration

from Scott Campbell of Pièce de Résistance in which according to Complex Style

Website, " his cut currency works, Campbell uses uncut sheets of dollars he sourced

from the U.S. Mint and creates mini, precise sculptures with a 3D relief effect

attained by laser cutting stack of bills". This is one of the reasons why we made it a

hybrid project, as it will be troublesome to use laser cutting in a very short time.

According to the figure below, we can see one of the artwork of Scott Campbell of

Pièce de Résistance. From this inspiration, we are planning to make banana leaves,

because in Indonesia if you go to the village area you will find a lot of banana leaves

there and as we were inspired from Indonesia, our hometown, we will make the

banana leaves from paper with laser cut, and for the leave spine we will use gold, to

give value of the leaf that we made as people determined value in that way. The

figure below shows the artwork of Scott Campbell and our leaves laser cut to form

money (in this case we photoshopped the leaves by adding the money sign into it).

‘Pièce de Résistance’ by Scott Campbell

Rough Leaf/Money art by Vincent Austin Wu

Inspiration by Gavin Turk (William Reynaldi SOLICHIN, 53403619):

As few months ago we visited a gallery in Hong Kong, and I was inspired to see one

of the artist, called Gavin Turk, in which he made a veggie box out of copper metal,

painted the copper metal to that of a veggie box shown in the figure below. As

inspired by him, we will be making the dollar that has been laser cut into the banana

leaves shape.

Veggie Box by Gavin Turk By making the artwork similar to that of a banana leaves, we will show in the figure below of how banana leaves looks like, and this is another reasons why it is a hybrid project as it will takes time to paint the whole banana leaves, especially the gold as the leaf stem, which we will cover with newspaper to give the smooth texture of a stem.

Inspiration by JSG Boggs (Vincent Austin WU, 53277727) JSG Boggs is known for his artwork relating to money. He is known to be capable of drawing dollar bills that looks real, then he tries to spend his “money”/artwork for goods or services. For it to be successful, he should make the people receiving his “money” appreciate the artwork he created, and so the artwork will then have value and the transaction can happen. Boggs himself considers the transaction as another kind of art, more specifically, performance arts. We will try to replicate the performance arts by Mr. Boggs. We will use our artwork as money, and so we will try to make people believe our artwork has value, just like money. And once we succeed in convincing people to exchange our artwork with their goods/services, we will have finally made the statement “paying with leaves” valid. This can be potentially dangerous, however. Not everyone will appreciate this kind of “performance arts.” This goes especially to the authorities. By conducting this “performance arts,” we can potentially mess with the monetary system of the society, and we can eventually be dealing with the police. CONCLUSION (William Reynaldi SOLICHIN, 53403619): In conclusion, we will try to sell our artwork which has been made by laser cut from the inspiration of Scott Campbell, paint the money into leaf color as inspired by Gavin Turk, and show it to the rich society in Indonesia hiding the fact that this is an actually expensive artwork covered to make it look ordinary, and we will inform them after they agreed to buy this artwork as inspired by J. S. G. Boggs. We will try to make the society rethink of the definition of value. Reference: 1. Image of Red Leaves: http://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/fall-leaves-14061326.jpg 2. Image of Green Leaves: http://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/green-leaves-isolated-844638.jpg 3. Information of Scott Campbell Artwork: http://www.complex.com/style/2011/11/laser-cut-money-art-by-scott-campbell 4. Image of Banana Leaf: http://www.banana-plants.com/sitebuilder/images/bananaleaf-472x189.jpg 5. Lorenzo Duran Silva Leaf Art: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2219024/Leaf-art-Lorenzo-Duran-Silva-From-praying-mantis-complex-patterns-amazing-art-cutting-LEAVES.html