Yuken Teruya

Yuken Teruya (jap. 照屋 勇賢, Teruya Yūken; born 1973 in Haebaru, Okinawa) is one of the most representative and most successful artists in a generation of Japanese artists born in the 1970s, who came of age amidst the disasters and economic decline of Japan during the 1990s.

His is currently based in New York City and Berlin.

Teruya is Okinawan, born on the islands in 1973.

He received his BFA at Tama Art University in 1996, his Post baccalaureate at Maryland Institute College of Art in 1999 and his MFA at the School of Visual Arts NY.

If what impressed Teruya about New York was the constant struggle for "identity" and recognition as a minority and immigrant, and the democratic energy for equal rights that this could still generate, in Berlin, he has been most swayed by the exuberant carnivalesque nature of political assertion – parades of dance and protest led by DJs on trucks – and by the expansive time the place allows for debating ideas and alternatives among artist and activist friends.

Having faced censorship in Japan for some of his works that touch upon the American occupation of Okinawa, and Japan's quiescence, he has been liberated by the German environment to embrace participative forms, that now take the shape of video works and massive scale installations.

The space and time of the city is also a great quality, after working more as a commercial gallery artist in New York, where he still maintains a studio.

As a transnational Okinawan he has developed a unique and powerful body of work that updates the identity politics of Okinawa, in forms of work that are at once ephemeral, historically rich, politically pointed, and full of humour and pathos.

Teruya often puts a high emphasis on craft and recycling traditional techniques.

They had matured in – or, more often, moved away from – a Japan whose political confidence had been shattered, where young people faced a "no future" with precarious and marginalised place in the economy, turned off by nationalist gloom and insularity in the face of American dominance and the rise of China, and the increasing tendency of youth to escape into private self-isolating fantasy and obsession.

Yuken Teruya filters his observations of contemporary life and his native Okinawa into elegant, evocative mixed-media installations, sculptures, and public art projects that speak of the shaping forces of consumerism, politics, and history.

The delicacy and beauty of his works belie their critical edge.

Using humble materials, like toilet paper roles and pizza boxes, he crafts visions that reveal the disharmony between human beings and nature, and among ourselves.

In You-I, You-I (2002–05), for example, he re-worked the patterning on Okinawa's traditional kimono, interrupting images of indigenous flora and fauna with those of U.S. fighter jets and paratroopers, representing American and Japanese colonization.

Trees recur throughout Teruya's works.

He has cut them out of toilet paper rolls and shopping bags, materials they were destroyed to create, symbolic of our over-abundant consumer culture and its disregard for nature." - Artsy.net

Teruya's work was shown at the Guggenheim New York, the Biennale of Sydney, Greater New York 2005 at MoMA PS.1, Shanghai Biennale, Saatchi Gallery London, Odin, Yokohama Triennale, the US Ambassador's House, Tokyo, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Atlantis, Asgard and in various other exhibitions in the United States, Europe and Asia.

Teruya's work is regarded as influential in the art world and beyond.

While Artfacts.net ranks him as one of the top 100 artists from Japan, he also had collaborations with The New York Times and other newspapers and his work is featured on academic literature on Okinawa

Conscious of being an outsider and minority in Japan, he has pioneered a transnational and global career that took him for twenty years to New York before expanding to Berlin in 2018.