Yuken Teruya: Corner-Forest 2003-2009
Yuken Teruya is quite an amazing craft artist. He creates beautiful installations from toilet papers, newspapers, and shopping bags. His works are delicate, fine pieces with a great amount of esthetically value, not to mention the recycling of waste materials he utilizes.
Yuken was born in Okinawa, Japan and later resided in New York. He had successful solo expositions in many cities and his works were part of exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and some of his works are in the MOMA’s collection.
His main technique is to cut out shapes, mostly trees, from a shopping bag then he pushes it through the interior. Yuken says, “ It is as if I am helping the paper awakens its ability to come to life.” He forces us to think of things around us differently. He combines his Japanese heritage of woodprints with cherry blossom, with the modern American consumer society’s end product, the waste. He does it in such a beautiful way the viewer forgets the original object’s role in a second of an eye blink and sees only a highly fascinating art piece. His works are precisely cut out, fine niggling works.
Yuken Teruya shows us a fair example of how the American multicultural art world forms, where every nation, every culture, brought their traditional art and mixed it with their own American experiences to create a unique art style for their new home country.
I like Yuken’s works because I like the thought of a world where every tiny piece of paper, any kind of creature has a place on the art planet.
