A Japanese man in his thirties has discovered a unique outlet for his keen eye and phenomenally steady hands: coin stacking art.
Tanu, who lives in Japan’s Tohoku region, has a day job. But in his free time, he loves to create mind-bending, gravity-defying works of art using nothing but a flat surface and a stack of coins of different denominations.
In an interview with The Epoch Times, Tanu said, “I started 10 years ago when I casually piled up coins in my wallet. Since I started creating my works, I have been inspired by the shapes of objects around me.”
For Tanu, whose mantra is “keep calm, and keep your hands from trembling,” a stacked coin sculpture can take anything between 30 minutes and two hours to build, depending on its size and complexity. Sometimes his coins are stacked horizontally, sometimes upright, edge to narrow edge, seeming to defy the laws of gravity.
He will sometimes use household objects such as cutlery, bottles, toothpicks, and mugs to add support and dimension to his art, and claims, “Once balanced, it is often stable until it is broken by hand.”
One of his favorite pieces is a sculpture in which three of Japan’s smallest coins are stacked vertically—“very difficult, but I like the simple look,” he said. And another involves coins stacked in a spiral pattern inside a bottle.
“I like the mystery of the ‘bottle ship,” said Tanu, who prefers to keep his identity as mysterious as his masterpieces.
“I am happy to receive responses such as ’surprised‘ and ’amazing,'” Tanu said, insisting, “Even things that we use casually can be played in various ways, if we change the way we look at them. Everyone, please try the challenge!”
