Biography

Masami Teraoka employs a striking blend of artistic and cultural influences to explore how political, social, and cultural dilemmas of contemporary society affect our lives and experiences. Borrowing from the past, Teraoka skillfully translates historical commentary into the visual language of present-day society. Personal fantasy, historical allusion, and art historical references  all play key roles in Teraoka’s paintings as he weaves together fact and fiction, East and West, past and present.

Teraoka’s interest in art and aesthetics began during his childhood in Onomichi, Japan. As the son of kimono fabric store owners, Teraoka was surrounded by traditional Japanese patterns and textile designs. His grandmother’s collection of Ukiyo-e woodblock prints further increased his interest in Japanese aesthetics, which he later studied at Kwansei Gakuin University in Kobe, where he obtained a B.A. As a boy in Japan during the postwar American occupation, Teraoka was introduced to Western material objects that had not previously been available in the country. His interactions with American GIs and his exposure to Western culture fueled the artist’s interest in the United States. At age 25 he moved to Los Angeles and enrolled at the Otis Art Institute, where he earned his B.F.A. and later his M.F.A. in 1968.

After spending time in the United States, Teraoka marveled at the differences between what he describes as the individuality and freedom of choice that characterize American culture and the desire for conformity that was more typical of his experience in Japan. His mounting interest in the dichotomies of Eastern and Western cultures, values, and familial traditions eventually surfaced in his work during the mid-1970s and early 1980s. His watercolors from this period, which appear to humorously juxtapose the two cultures, often cloak a potent critique of corporate hegemony and environmental abuse. In the 1980s, spurred by the spread of HIV and the fear of AIDS, Teraoka began to explore the ways in which the virus ravaged communities and individual lives, and threatened the freedom of sexuality. In AIDS Series/Geisha and Ghost Cat (1989–2002), Teraoka adopts the traditional style of Ukiyo-e woodblock prints, which celebrated the concerns of the merchant class in Edo-period Japan and often referred to imagery of the floating world, such as the relationships of geisha, samurai, and actors in the Kabuki theater. He depicts a frightened couple, interrupted during a moment of intimacy by a geisha and a ghostlike cat. As harbingers of death, the floating geisha and her feline companion deliver a difficult message—despite their precautions, the couple will fall victim to the deadly effects of AIDS. As an added salute to the iconography of traditional Ukiyo-e, the eyes of the man and woman are banded in blue, indicating that they too will become ghosts. Like the other works from this series, Geisha and Ghost Cat boldly considers whether the human race can survive the challenges of contemporary society.

This interest continues to occupy Teraoka in his recent work. Political commentary and satire have always been integral to his conceptual approach, whether adopting the visual language of Japanese Ukiyo-e or engaging the traditions of Renaissance painting. In his Semana Santa series, Teraoka uses religious, cultural, and social icons to investigate and critique the ways in which the Internet, the church, the government, and the media have inserted themselves into the body politic. In Semana Santa/Cloning Eve and Geisha (2003) the artist addresses these issues through the conflation of Eastern and Western aesthetics. After traveling through Europe in the 1990s, Teraoka began incorporating the stylistic traditions of the West into his work. In Cloning Eve and Geisha, he skillfully blends Northern and Italian Renaissance compositional structure and paint application with a traditional Japanese style. Combining the conventional triptych format of the Renaissance altarpiece and the Eastern tradition of screen painting, the artist creates a startlingly up-to-date work that relies on topical, contemporary themes to balance a spectrum of historical references. In the left panel, he presents two samurai who have had sex-change operations, though they appear to be having a “change of heart”—one literally undergoes a heart transplant. The center panel features two Eves who have been expelled from the Garden of Eden; and the right panel shows two geisha, caught between contemporary reality and tradition. The characters appear in pairs—clones of one another. Through these cloned images, Teraoka critiques the role of science and technology in contemporary society. However, these same images also reveal the artist’s sense of hope for the future. The clones are different from their originals, suggesting the possibility of improvement and the desire for change.

Teraoka also draws attention in this painting to the parallels between the history of capitalism and Christianity. In the right panel, for example, the artist conflates the steeple on the Cathedral of San Marco in Venice with one of the World Trade Center towers. In reference to September 11, 2001, he places two small figures tumbling from a top-story window. The procession of figures at the bottom of the work also refers to similarities between historical occurrences and contemporary events.1 The group at once refers to the 13th-century Spanish Inquisition and the contemporary practices of Semana Santa (Saint’s Week), in which the monastic orders parade through the city in a variety of costumes ranging from clothes that would be seen in a Hieronymus Bosch painting to outfits resembling Ku Klux Klan robes. Semana Santa/Cloning Eve and Geisha, like AIDS Series/Geisha and Ghost Cat, represents Teraoka’s ability to look both backward and forward simultaneously. Using traditional styles and historical references, he is able to examine and critique contemporary issues with remarkable insight and perspective. —L.W.

1. The lower section of the work also refers to the Renaissance convention of including a predella panel, a narrative scene that would relate to or expand upon the larger images painted above, below an altarpiece.

(SJMA Selections publication, 2004)

Teraoka was born in Onomichi, Japan in 1936. He received a B.A. in aesthetics at Kawansei Gakuin University in Kobe, Japan in 1959. In 1961 he moved to the United States, and graduated from Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles with a B.A. and an M.F.A. in 1968. Teraoka’s artwork has been included in solo and group exhibitions throughout Europe, Japan, Taiwan, Mexico, Australia, and the United Sates. In addition, his work is held in the collections of several major museums in the United States and abroad. He currently lives and works in Waimanalo, Hawaii. This would be the second work by Teraoka to enter SJMA’s collection. (SJMA Collections Committee, 2003)

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