Yuken Teruya, JP

Yuken Teruya’s works address issues of contemporary society, such as consumerist culture, globalism and environment, out of various everyday materials.

He also visualizes the current complex dispute on his homeland Okinawa through his keen insight and refined skills, and quietly inspires the viewer’s thoughts.

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 visualize values that cannot be measured. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Louvre Museum, and Vatican City become among the subjects of the work. In this presentation the concept expands the investigation of the symbols represented by the jewels which are inherited to the royal family of Great Britain.

Teruya compose various senses of a fall through historical artifacts, repetition of the patterns, even inspired by design of the jewels, and in those stories you are given by the dialogue through his works.

Yuken Teruya (1973, Japan) is an artist based in Berlin and Okinawa. 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 Pompidou Metz, Metz, and the Saatchi Gallery, London. His works are held in the public collections of the British Museum, 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 Hoffmann Collection, Berlin, the Humboldt Forum, Berlin, and the Daimler Collection, Stuttgart, among others.