Yuken Teruya

“Freeing the Fish”

Photograph courtesy Asia Society

“Free Fish: The Art of Yuken Teruya” is the artist’s take on the goldfish motif that adorns a Ming-era Chinese vase in the Asia Society’s collection. Teruya is the second artist the museum has commissioned to respond to a work in storage (the first was Michael Joo).

Okinawa-born, New York–based Teruya’s tools are simple: shopping bags and an X-acto knife. Here, he has cut goldfish silhouettes—“freeing” the fish—in five bright-orange plastic sacks found in Chinatown. Three are suspended from thin, bowed wires, bobbing playfully around the vase (displayed on a pedestal that also supports two haphazardly placed bags). The fluttering trio creates a counterpoint to the static object by mimicking swimming fish. Nearby, replica poi—scoops used in the Japanese fish-catching game kingyo sukui—are embellished with an AmEx card, loose coins and a medal, updating an Asian symbol of prosperity and power.

In a related piece, Teruya collaborated with Okinawan craftspeople to create a vibrantly printed kimono, using the traditional bingata dyeing technique, a 15th-century practice revived after WWII. Bingata integrates Pan-Asian styles (Indian, Chinese and Javanese), and Teruya’s textile similarly mixes the goldfish motif with images of objects from the museum’s collection—a Korean cup and a Nepali bodhisattva, among others.

Though Teruya is known for his “tree” series, delicate cut-paper shadow boxes fashioned from shopping bags, the inclusion of four of these—all made from McDonald’s Happy Meal sacks—feels superfluous. Teruya’s “Free Fish” installation stands on its own, a deceptively simple project that raises complex questions about cross-cultural hybrids . — Emily Talbot