In 2002, Japanese art journal Bijutsu Techo (Art Notes) devoted its February issue to the ‘Zero Zero Generation’ — the artists whose tendencies would dominate the 2000s. The Zero Zero artists, it argued, were ‘mild-mannered reformers’ pursuing ‘feasible utopias’ embedded in everyday life, who were not afraid to use traditional symbols and techniques. Artists cited in Yukie Kamiya’s editorial included Tetsuya Nakamura, Rika Noguchi, Tam Ochiai, Tsuyoshi Ozawa, Taro Shinoda, Yoshihiro Suda, Hiroshi Sugito and Momoyo Torimitsu, but the generation was largely defined as those born between the mid 1960s and the mid 1970s, who had established their careers toward the end of the 1990s.¹ The Japanese economy posted modest gains throughout the 2000s, and the period’s relative stability was reflected in the apparent ambivalence of the Zero Zero artists to broader social and political questions. But, as critic Midori Matsui would observe several years later when she rebranded the tendency as ‘Micropop’, the artists’ small gestures and unassuming works, at least in their darker manifestations, ‘expressed a pent-up anger at the monotony of the everyday and a longing for some kind of violent break in the existing order’.²

Though hardly as chaotic as Taro Izumi, Chihiro Mori and other figures cited by Matsui, the creations of Yuken Teruya express a comparable play of diffidence and disenchantment. Born in Okinawa in 1973, Teruya is part of the first generation to have no memories of a Japan not dominated by consumer culture. Those of Teruya’s age group have also most intensely felt what cultural anthropologist Anne Allison has described as the ‘ordinary refugeeism’ of the Heisei years.³ Coming to maturity just as the ‘bubble’ burst, theirs is the ‘lost generation’ of ‘freeters’, ‘parasite singles’ and ‘shut-ins’.⁴

The experience of consumerist immersion is reflected in Teruya’s choice of materials, almost entirely drawn from the detritus of mass-produced, mass-marketed goods and services — pizza delivery boxes, toilet rolls, shoe boxes, newspapers and paper currency are among the objects he teases into delicate, incongruous sculptural tableaux. In his best-known body of work, Notice – Forest, an ongoing series begun in 2003, Teruya creates tiny papercut trees from the bags of fast-food, coffee house and fashion chains, as well as art galleries. Where the preceding generation of Neo Pop artists expressed a critical facility with their mass-cultural appropriations and imitations — even the hyper-consumerist strategies of Takashi Murakami and the Superflat artists belied a degree of ironic distance — Micropop conveyed a sense of being cut adrift within consumer society. Analogously, Teruya frames his exquisite trees within the very bags from which they were cut.

On one level, Notice – Forest may be read as a critique of the environmental costs of excessive packaging and a longing for a more direct experience of nature or, more figuratively, the tree-like structures could reference global commerce. There is certainly a strong case for relating the work to issues in Teruya’s native Okinawa, where a longstanding American military presence has caused damage to the natural environment, at the same time as preventing the destruction of others by hindering commercial development.⁵ But, in their fragility, Yuken Teruya’s works have an additional melancholic dimension, a sense of the precariousness of beauty and of the search for solace, however fleeting, in moments of creation and expression.

Endnotes

1. Yukie Kamiya, ‘Aiming for a feasible utopia’, Bijutsu Techo, February 2002.
2. Midori Matsui, The Age of Micropop: The New Generation of Japanese Artists, Parco Publishing, Tokyo, 2007, p.45.
3. Anne Allison, Precarious Japan, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2013, pp.43–76.
4. The term ‘freeters’ refers to young people unwilling to join the mainstream job market; ‘parasite singles’ are adult children who live at home and continue to depend on their parents financially; ‘shut-ins’ (referred to as hikikomori) are those who are withdrawn from all social contact.
5. Taro Amano, ‘Paper bag environments’, in Lynne Seear and Suhanya Raffel (eds), The 5th Asia–Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art [exhibition catalogue] Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 2006, p.232.