I am always aware what’s happening in this society. And if there is a significant event like 9/11 or a shuttle exploded just recently, I like to introduce those social and cultural events in my painting. . . . [M]y painting is definitely based on real life and fantasy. I weave through opposite forms . . . eventually I can orchestrate a visual symphony.
Masami Teraoka, in Lynda Hess, Cloning Eve and Geisha (San Francisco: Catherine Clark Gallery, 2003), DVD.
From a young age, painting was the central focus of Masami Teraoka’s life. He was born in Onomichi, Japan, in 1936 and studied watercolor under a local artist. Recognizing his talent, Teraoka’s parents bought him whatever art supplies they could afford and encouraged him to go to art school. He graduated in 1959 with a BA in aesthetics from Kwansei Gakuin University in Hyogo, Japan, where he not only painted but also studied theater and literature. He moved to Los Angeles in 1961, where he spent seven years at Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, earning a BFA in 1964 followed by an MFA in 1968. But amid the sexual revolution of the late 1960s, he was disappointed in contemporary art, which seemed to be missing the amorous sensuality and erotic freedom expressed in popular culture;1 to Teraoka the conventions of Minimalism, which could been seen in the fiberglass resin sculptures he made at Otis, were too austere. As he shifted to working with the figure in a narrative style, Hollywood and his earlier drama studies influenced his style. “In my mind,” he explained, “I write my own visual script, like for a Hollywood movie.”2
Alison Bing, “Masami-za: The Narrative Art Theater of Masami Teraoka,” in Ascending Chaos: The Art of Masami Teraoka (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2006), 33. ↩︎
Alison Bing, “Masami-za: The Narrative Art Theater of Masami Teraoka,” in Ascending Chaos: The Art of Masami Teraoka (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2006), 38. ↩︎
Pop art and its critique of consumer culture resonated with Masami Teraoka. In 1970, after living in the United States for nearly ten years, he was ready to look back at his cultural roots, adopting ukiyo-e images—which he had encountered as a child in his grandparents’ collection—for the modern moment. These woodblock prints reflected Japan’s own consumer culture during the Edo period (1615–1868), fed by such interests as fashion, sex, and entertainment of an emerging class of affluent commoners. Teraoka used ukiyo-e aesthetic traditions—first in watercolor and later on large canvases as well as etchings—to address themes like environmental degradation, consumerism, race relations, and gender and sexuality. In the 1980s he developed a major series on the AIDS epidemic, creating images portraying the tragedy and universality of the crisis. Terrified samurai and geisha figures are haunted by ghosts while struggling with condoms. Drawing on characteristics of the Kabuki stage, sickly blue shadows tint their eyes ominously evincing death, and calligraphy—like that of the kabuki narrator’s script—warns of impending danger.1
Peter Selz, “Racism, Discrimination, Identity Politics,” Art of Engagement: Visual Politics in California and Beyond (San José, CA: San José Museum of Art, 2006), 221–22 ↩︎
Masami Teraoka developed a recurring cast of mythological characters—geisha and samurai, Adam and Eve, Catholic clergymen, snakes, catfish, and a trickster fox—icons that represent the government, church, society, and its moral qualities. In extravagant, uninhibited scenes, they are reminiscent of the carnal, hedonistic figures of Hieronymus Bosch (ca. 1450–1516), whose elaborate depictions of daily life, religion, and allegory Teraoka compares to the ukiyo-e artists he admires. “Bosch’s paintings are forceful [and] timeless . . . universal messages show a human nature and experience not very different from ours today,” he once described.1 Though Teraoka makes specific contemporary references, such as to technology and sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, his fantastic conflicts place current global culture in the context of history and place, more broadly portraying human pathos.
Masami Teraoka, with Lynda Hess, “Monitoring Our Times,” in Paintings by Masami Teraoka (Washington, DC: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 1996), 53. ↩︎
After traveling through Europe in the 1990s, Teraoka began to look more deeply at the history of Western art and its influence on American culture, asking himself, “how would Adam and Eve see American culture if they descended from Heaven today?”1 In large-scale altarpieces like Semana Santa/Cloning Eve and Geisha (2002–03), he layered Eastern and Western aesthetics, combining traditions of Japanese folding-screen painting with medieval and Renaissance Christian iconography into charged and chaotic contemporary narratives. At the center, two cloned Eves have been expelled from the Garden of Eden, seduced by computer mice and ushered by a cloaked Catholic clergyman with a snakelike phallus. On the left, two samurai are sexually transitioning while, on the right, two geishas appear entangled between past and present.
Masami Teraoka, in Masami Teraoka: A Conversation with the Artist, Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, October 21, 1997 (posted July 16, 2013), video, 26:39 minutes, available at [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1q607TGdl4]. ↩︎
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