Artists

Yuken Teruya, Yuken Teruya

Press release

There is a phrase by Du Fu, “a country may fall but its mountains and rivers remain.” After Japan’s defeat in World War II, many Japanese recalled this verse and quoted it often. However, the verse does not apply to Okinawa, where the total number of bombs that exploded during the Battle of Okinawa in 1945 (including those dropped from aeroplanes and shelling on the ground) amounted to 200,000 tons of explosives. The colours of the Okinawan landscape — its natural shades of green and the red tiles of residences — have mostly turned grey. Even in villages that had never known the sea, ‘iron storms’ were a reminder of the threat from the sea that lay far behind the mountains. U.S. battleships firing artillery filled the offshore landscape of Okinawa with darkness. The Battle of Okinawa, which involved residents who were deployed as “a sacrificed stone” before the decisive battle on the mainland, killed one in four residents. The bombs that actually cause death, injury, and destruction are pieces of iron blown as storms. The explosives no longer have the shape of rockets or guns; they look more like crushed ore. Countless iron shards from the destruction have long been part of the Okinawan landscape. They continue to lurk quietly in the fields and bushes of the battlegrounds. It is as if they deny their past actions. The series of works To the Sky exposes fragments of bombs that continue to wait to be picked up and removed from memory by balloons.