# 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.

## Biography

]st conflict in history.

## Works

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

## Exhibitions

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.

## Significance

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

## Public collections (selection)

* British Museum, London, UK
* Guggenheim Museum, New York, US
* The Museum of Modern Art, New York, US
* Daiichi Seimei Museum, Tokyo, Japan
* Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, US
* Daimler Art Collection, Berlin, Germany
* Twigg-Smith Museum, Honolulu, US
* Hoffman Collection, Berlin, Germany
* Ethnological Museum, Berlin, Germany
* Altoids Collection, New Museum, New York, US
* Norton Collection, New York, US
* Charles Saatchi Collection, London, UK
* Sakima Art Museum, Okinawa, Japan
* Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan
* Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Japan
* Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC
* 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Ishikawa, Japan
* The Rachofsky Art Collection, Dallas, US

## Awards

* 2007 Painters and Sculptors Grant Program Award, Joan Mitchell Foundation, US
* 2006 Artist in Residence Award, Art Scope Daimler Chrysler Japan, Japan
* 2005 NYFA fellowship - Lily AuchinclossLily Auchincloss Fellow 200 -Vision of Contemporary Artists, Japan
* 2005 Emerging Artist Award, The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Arts, US
* 2001 Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Fellowship, Skowhegan, US