MASAMI TERAOKA

'Masami Teraoka' (born 1936) is a contemporary painter and printmaker. He was born in 1936 in the town of Onomichi, between Hiroshima and Osaka, Japan. He studied art from 1954-59 at the Kwansei Gakuin University in Kobe, Japan where he received his B.A. in Aesthetics. He moved to the United States in 1961 and from 1964-68 attended the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, where he received a B.A. and M.F.A.
His early work consisted primarily of watercolor paintings and prints that mimicked the flat, bold qualities of ukiyo-e woodblock prints. These paintings, done after his arrival in the United States, often featured the collision of the two cultures. ''McDonald's Hamburgers Invading Japan'' and ''31 Flavors Invading Japan'' characterize this time period. These pieces blended reality with fantasy, humor with commentary, history with the present.
In the 1980s, Teraoka shifted to depicting AIDS as a subject, transforming his ukiyo-e derived paintings into a darker realm.
Since the late 1990s, he has been producing large-scale figurative paintings addressing social and political issues. These large-scale paintings borrow from well-known Renaissance paintings, rather than from Japanese woodblock prints. They incorporate self-portraits, as well as portraits of his artist-wife Lynda Hess and daughter Eve.
Masami Teraoka has given lectures at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Asian Art Society, the Institute of Fine Arts/NYU, and Brown University, among many others, and has received a number of grants and awards. He has also completed numerous commissioned pieces, including a painting, ''Samurai Businessmen'' for the cover of TIME Magazine, and ''Green Rabbit Island'' for the State Foundation for the Arts and Culture, Honolulu, Hawaii.
The Addison Gallery of American Art (Andover, Massachusetts), the Allen Memorial Art Museum (Oberlin College, Ohio), The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, the Honolulu Academy of Arts, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Hawaii State Art Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington D.C.), the San Diego Museum of Art (California), the San Jose Museum of Art (California) and the Tate Gallery (London) are among the public collections holding works by Masami Teraoka. He is represented by the Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco and the Patricia Faure Gallery in Los Angeles. He is arguably the most important visual artist residing in Hawaii.

Contents

Gallery

References

Gallery

References

★ Clark, Catharine, Alison Bing, Eleanor Heartney, and Kathryn Hoffman, “Ascending Chaos, The Art of Masami Teraoka”, San Francisco, Chronicle Books, 2006.

★ Clarke, Joan and Diane Dods, "Artists/Hawaii", Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press, 1996.

★ Link, Howard A., “Waves and Plagues, The Art of Masami Teraoka”, San Francisco, Chronicle Books, 1988.

★ Teraoka, Masami, “Masami Teraoka”, New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1979.

★ Teraoka, Masami, “Masami Teraoka, From Tradition to Technology, The Floating World Comes of Age”, Seattle, Washington, University of Washington Press, 1997.

★ Teraoka, Masami, “Paintings by Masami Teraoka”, Washington, DC, Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 1996.

★ Yoshihara, Lisa A., ''Collective Visions, 1967-1997'', [Hawaii] State Foundation on Culture and the Arts, Honolulu, Hawaii, 1997, 131.