MUR 021 | WESTON TERUYA || KUROSHIO NO MABUI
Weston works at the intersection of sculpture, installation, paper-based construction, and community-rooted research. His practice treats paper not just as material, but as a way of thinking—an everyday medium for communication, memory, and history. ​His research titled Kuroshio no Mabui traces the Kuroshio Current as a living link between Pacific archipelagos — a flow carrying histories, exchanges, and island resilience across colonial margins.
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"When first diving into the project, I was curious about connections between Okinawa and Taiwan given their geographic proximity and histories of trade along the Kuroshio current. I was struck by the ways that narratives of conflict–particularly the 1871 Mudan incident where Okinawan sailors from Miyako who landed ashore near Taiwanese indigenous territory on Taiwan were killed in a misunderstanding, and subsequent Japanese, Chinese, and US military occupation–overdetermine understandings of the historic record."
During his residency, Weston led a paper workshop using the red soil from our pink Turtle site and Awagami washi paper pulp. Participants created textured, vibrant sheets, connecting the island’s earth with hands-on experimentation and material storytelling.
From handmade sheets to found scraps, Weston uses paper as a carrier of stories uncovered through his research. Most recently, he’s begun making Shikuwasa paper, inspired by a fruit native to both Ryukyu and Taiwan, exploring the environmental and cultural ties that connect the two regions.
Weston Teruya (b. Honolulu, Hawaiʻi) is an Oakland-based artist from a fourth-generation Okinawan family. Working primarily through sculpture, installation, and research-driven projects, his practice examines the entangled histories of land, labor, migration, and militarization across Hawaiʻi, Okinawa, and the broader Pacific.
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Weston’s work engages material processes and spatial interventions as a way to surface suppressed narratives embedded in everyday landscapes and infrastructures. Drawing on archival research, vernacular materials, and collaborative methodologies, his projects foreground how colonial and imperial legacies continue to shape contemporary environments and social relations. In addition to his individual practice, Weston is a co-founding member of Related Tactics, a collective of artists of color producing site-responsive and socially engaged works that address public memory, race, and power. His work has been presented in museums, public spaces, and community contexts in the United States and internationally.