 Tcherkelov cites the panic in the Bulgarian banking sector in the 1990s, which forced the government to devaluate the national currency, the Lev, by removing three zeroes, as the initial impetus that drove his consideration, from an aesthetic perspective, of the symbolic power of money.He also points to his arrival in New York as an immigrant, and his reliance on coins to make calls from payphones, as having "left [him] with the feeling of communication," and that money is a component of expression.Cultural critic Georgette Gouveia notes that Houben's aesthetic "is related to 20th-century Pop Art, but rather than focus on manufactured Pepsi-Cola or Brillo boxes as Warhol famously did, he focuses on the financial instruments that are engines of wealth."