For Teruya, Seiken and Shizuko embody not only the tragedy of Okinawa's past but also its enduring legacy: the wounds of war carried quietly across generations, alongside the quiet courage and grace of those who bore them.

It is this dual inheritance, of scar and of spirit, that animates the entire body of work on view.

Japanese artist Yuken Teruya returns to Miami for his second solo exhibition, What We Carry, featuring new works spanning sculpture, stencils, and traditional Okinawan Bingata dyed fabrics. Together, these works reflect on the history of Okinawa during World War II and imagine a future seen through the eyes of two fictional protagonists: Seiken and Shizuko.

Unfolding through the imagined lives of Seiken and Shizuko, figures drawn from the artist’s own lineage, the exhibition moves between absence and presence, survival and disappearance. Their stories linger quietly throughout the works, carrying with them the weight of memory and the fragile persistence of life against the forces that seek to erase it.

At its core, Break the Curse introduces a new series in which the stencil becomes both a gesture of concealment and revelation—echoing the layered, meticulous process of Bingata dyeing. Across surfaces both delicate and raw, Teruya allows images of flight, rupture, and renewal to emerge, holding in tension the beauty of form and the violence of history.

In What We Carry, the past is neither distant nor resolved. It is carried forward in fragments, in gestures, in breath, asking us to hold both the wound and the wonder, and to remain its storytellers.

Press Release

Curatorial Text