In the early 1940s, the Japanese Empire briefly issued a type of military currency in its colonies of North Borneo, Malaysia, and Singapore. This currency came to be known as ‘banana money’ because of the images of bananas featured on its ten dollar bank notes. Not long after its introduction, however, a hyperinflation-induced crash rendered all banana money unusable, seeing it become a synonym for ‘worthless’ throughout the region. With a degree of irony, since 2018 Banano Coin (BAN) is a new virtual currency which has been developed in order to support green eco-transactions - although of course this too is still susceptible to the risks presented by cryptocurrency as a stable form of exchange. Inheriting the artist’s longstanding concern with transborder issues and colonial economies, the exhibition Banana Coin attempts to use the symbolic significance of the banana to project utopian ideas within the context of globalization. The video installation Weather Forecast of Banana Plantation, deploying the image of ten dollar ‘banana money’ banknotes as its main visual reference, connects with the real-time weather tracker, Google Weather, to instantly display the weather conditions of former colonial banana plantations. However, completely unrelated to any real-time changes in the weather, the banana plants on display here sway slowly at a constant frequency, as if time somehow remains fixed for this expired currency. Whilst this is happening, a live AI voice is heard throughout the installation singing about global banana prices and the rate of inflation from World War Two to the present day. The resulting sense of dissonance is reminiscent of the contemporary situation of the former banana plantations, whereby the failure of the colonial economy was followed by the construction of a new layer of modernization. In this process, new memories were placed on top of many that have yet to be healed. In addition, through a series of experiments of rethinking existing currencies and removing their symbolic meanings, in the artwork Banana Coin Li Kuei-Pi has designed a trading system in which the audience is invited to participate. The artist uses a virtual currency system to mint tokens and has reinterpreted the image of ‘banana money’ into two assets: a valuable object converted from New Taiwan Dollars (NTD), or a Non-Fungible Token (an NFT). Participants will earn tokens through physical labor, deciding at various stages in the process how to allocate them. In a series of transformations of labor, matter, and value, the stability and trust mechanisms of such a system are really put to the test. At the same time, the plasticity of social discourse is brought forth, allowing us to reevaluate the socio-economic and political conflicts underlying the creation of value. Organizer/ Commissioned by｜Hong Foundation Supporting Partner｜Panasonic Taiwan Sponsor｜Department of Cultural Affairs, Taipei City Government