Yuken Teruya

Yuken Teruya turns frameworks and daily problems with brilliant insight that you unconsciously live with into artworks while changing the original usage and displacing its meaning. He utilizes daily goods and familiar objects, such as toilet paper tubes, paper bags of fast food restaurants, national flags, and chrysalis.

In his representative work, "Notice-Forest", he put some fine cuts on paper bags of famous brands and fast food restaurants, and created a tree in it modeling a real one, like a street tree. Teruya stated that since paper bags are originally industrial products made from trees, it reminds of memories of trees, and it is an attempt to regenerate the tree. Not raising voice loudly, the method regenerating a Godiva's gold paper bag into a golden tree of autumn colors blind us giving a warning quietly to the contemporary society which repeats mass consumption society and deforestation.

Teruya set his hometown, Okinawa, as the central subject of making works. In "You-I, You-I", an artwork of Bingata, it is sophisticatedly arranged with flowers and birds as a traditional motif of Bingata, the U.S. troops' fighters in Okinawa which could be the biggest issue in the post-war period, parachute troops, and endangered dugongs inhabiting in the surrounding sea areas of Henoko, Okinawa.

The apparently beautiful Bingata quietly suggests that there are the U.S military bases as normal scenery of Okinawa even in the present which accounts for about 20 percent of its main land and causing frictions against the local residents. While the Japanese term, "Yui", in the title stands for a cooperative system based on spirit of mutual support, the term also means "You" and "I" in English. It makes us to consider how people in different positions and with senses of value, like the Okinawa's dichotomy between a southern island's image as a paradise and as a place of military base issues, Japan, Okinawa, and the U.S. should coexist with one another.

Likewise in his work, "Heroes", he colored with Benigata portratis of famous people who are heroes of Okinawa, such as an activist of civil rights movement in Okinawa called Kamejiro Senaga, a popular superhero on TV called, Ultraman, and Barack Obama who has been an American hero started to live in the U.S. since 1999, an American aboriginal person called Geronimo, a famous Japanese pop star called Namie Amuro, and Showa Emperor. Dealing with very political themes, like rulers and subjects, worshipping people and worshipped people, and domestic heroes and enemies for other countries, he catches viewers' attention by vivid hues and lyrical expressions which make us realize diverse positions, senses of value, and big issues lying there.