Yuken Teruya, Billowing, 2013
There is a phrase by Du Fu, “a country may fall but its mountains and rivers remain.” After Japan’s defeat in World War II, many Japanese spoke this verse and quoted it often. But the verse does not apply to Okinawa, where the total number of bombs exploded during the Battle of Okinawa in 1945, including those dropped from airplanes and shelling on the ground, was 200,000 tons. The colours of the Okinawan landscape, its natural colours of green and red tiles of residences, have mostly turned grey. Even in villages that had never known the sea, the iron storms were a reminder of the threat from the sea that lay far behind the mountains. U.S. battleships firing artillery fire filled the offshore landscape of Okinawa with blackness. The Battle of Okinawa, which involved residents who were “a sacrificed stone” before the decisive battle on the mainland, killed one in four residents. The bombs that actually cause death, injury, and destruction are pieces of iron that go up in storms. The exploding weapons no longer have the shape of rockets or guns; they look more like crushed ore. The countless iron shards after the destruction have long been part of the Okinawan landscape. They still lurk quietly in the fields and bushes of the battlegrounds. It is as if they deny their past actions. The To the Sky series of works exposes the fragments of bombs that continue to wait to be picked up and forgotten by balloons.
The same storm debris landscape extends to Ukraine, Palestine, and contemporary battlefields. A piece of iron buried in nature is still someone’s product. Can the identity and responsibility of the manufacturer be allowed to fade away naturally? Even after the explosion, the weapons remain on the ground as fragments. Not only to destroy someone’s life or destruction, but also to permanently change the terrain and environment. The manufacturer must be held responsible for the recovery of weapons after their manufacture, and for compensation for contamination and damage.
The Bingata Keshi Wind depicts a free and liberated Okinawa sky. Balloons are not allowed to fly in the vicinity of U.S. Marine Corps military airfields in Japan, which are located in densely populated areas, including the Bunkyo district of Ginowan City. This is because they are under the “jurisdiction” of the U.S. military and have no sovereignty over the skies. In this work, balloons are decorated with Bingata patterns, which are used as dance costumes in classical Okinawan dance. Passing through the traditional patterns of irises, weeping cherry blossoms, and auspicious clouds, the balloons soar freely upward to the open sky.
The Monopoly series is a symbol of money itself, toy money (Monopoly money). It is an attempt to re-measure the power of symbols in culture, nation, and religion as a tool to visualise values that cannot be measured. The works are based on the themes of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Le Bourg Museum, or the British flag.
Yuken Teruya (1973, Japan) is an artist based in Berlin and New York. Teruya received his BFA from Tama Art University in Tokyo in 1996 and his MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2001, where he has spent 20 years of his life. His works have been exhibited at the Saatchi Gallery, London (2013) and in the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Guggenheim, New York, the Flag Art Foundation, New York, the Renwick Gallery, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., the Charles Saatchi Collection, London, the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan, the Humboldt Forum, Berlin, and the Daimler Collection, Stuttgart, among others.
