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.
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.
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.
[1] 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.
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."