Yuken Teruya

Notice-Forest Louis Vuitton, 2019

In his Notice-Forest wall sculptures, Yuken Teruya borrows from the cycles of nature and the techniques of Japanese paper-cutting art (Kirigami), combining these with the real-world cycles of the global throw-away society. Teruya’s mediums are luxury brand shopping bags, fast food wrappers or other paper bags. Transformed into peep-boxes that excite a childlike curiosity, delicate trees and tiny forests are created in these paper spaces without adding or taking away material, but simply by cutting and folding. He often refers to concrete tree portraits: A tree in front of the artist’s Berlin studio window served as the motif for the Louis Vuitton version. “If there is something I want to bring to understanding (notice) with this work, it is that the bag in truth has never been featureless or worthless, that it has always been a living tree, and that the apparent ease achieved with the form of mass production and distribution has always been deceptive.” (Y.T.)