Teraoka masami biography of martin

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Masami Teraoka was born in 1936 in Onomichi, Japan and attended Kwensei Gakuin University in Kobe, Japan before emigrating to the United States in 1961 and receiving his B.F.A. and M.F.A. from Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, California. His first major series of works out of college reflected the influence of both Japan and the United States in his life: The works resembled traditional Japanese Ukiyo-e woodblock printmaking but also incorporated American pop-cultural images, such as hamburgers and ice-cream. Since then, Teraoka’s work has taken on more controversial political topics, such as the AIDs crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, while continuing to incorporate stylistic elements from eastern and western art history.

More recently, Teraoka’s The Cloisters are a series of works that adopt the triptych altarpiece format popular in Medieval and Renaissance Europe and the artistic style of Northern Renaissance masters such as Pieter Bruegel. With this anachronistic artistic format and style, Teraoka addresses contemporary political topics such as the Clinton impeachment, 9/11 terrorist attacks, artistic freedom in Russia, and the threat of nuclear war.

Teraoka has been the subject of more than 70 solo exhibitions, including at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1979); Yale University Art Gallery (1998); New Albion Gallery in Sydney, Australia (2012); and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution (1996). His work is represented in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Fine Arts Museum, San Francisco; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; and the Gallery of Modern Art in Scotland among other institutions.

I can’t remember when was the last time erotic art has intrigued and amused me the way Masami Teraoka’s renaissance inspired collection did. Actually I do. It was Jeff Koons series of photographies with Ilona Staler, at the end of the 80’s (Although there are a lot of voices that claim Koons did the series because, allegedly, he could not get laid, mainly because of his good personality, and that he used Ilona’s image for his own use ) And since we’re talking about the 70’s and 80’s, I have to also mention Eric Stanton, with his fantastic series of female dominance comics and H.R. Giger, who is widely considered a horror/macabre artist, but whose art I find extremely erotic.
Teraoka was born in 1936 in the town of Onimichi and moved to the United States in 1961. His first paintings were Ukiyo-e derived (Ukiyo-e “pictures of the floating world” – a genre of Japanese woodblock prints). With his move to the United States the inevitable clash between the eastern and western culture emerged, both in his style and themes. His most famous series in the 70’s are McDonald’s Hamburgers Invading Japan and 31 Flavors Invading Japan.

Gradually, his art work became more dark, more fantastic and visceral, as he shifted his focus towards the subject of AIDS and the abuses in the Catholic Church. The series about the Catholic Church is, by far, my favourite.
When I first saw The Cloisters Confessions and The Last Super/The Inversion of the Sacred, I tagged them mentally : #renaissance  #Bosch, #porn, #Grunewald, #strippers, #latex, #fetish, #Comics, #bondage, #Religion, #Caravaggio, #Humour #Orgy and, for some reason, #Greenaway’s “The Cook, the Thief his Wife and her Lover”.

Teraoka began the work for these series in the late 90’s and they are aesthetically very different from his early works. The “Ukiyo” is still there but this time it’s positive and dreamy attributes (… Living only for the moment, turning our full attention to the pleasures of the moon, the

Ghosts are telling stories at the Allen Art Museum these days. Ghosts of Adam and Eve, Japanese geishas and victims of AIDS. Masami Teraoka, a Japanese artist who now lives in Hawaii, is the conduit through which these ghosts speak. His exhibit "From Tradition to Technology, the Floating World Comes of Age" is at the Allen through May 31 and is one of the most moving, whimsical, dark and confessional shows to come to AMAM in quite some time.

Teraoka's medium is paint - both oil and watercolor - and he works on an enormous scale. His canvases are enormous, ranging in size from six to twenty feet in length and five to eight feet in height. His style is chaotic and dense. Teraoka's canvases are packed with detail.

His singular style is a hybrid of the traditional Japanese ukiyo-e - brightly colored and bold woodblock prints of scenes painted in a flat style - and American Pop Art. Teraoka explains that his work is made up of "Japanese cultural references with American social influences."

In conversation with two art classes one afternoon in the gallery, Teraoka, who has spent the week in residence at Oberlin, eloquently spoke about three of his pieces. The first piece, one of the most moving of the show, comes from Teraoka's AIDS series. Used in the museum's ad campaign for the exhibit, Geisha and AIDS Nightmare (1988) depicts a traditional Japanese geisha woman. On first glance, Teraoka's Geisha image is extremely traditional, in keeping with ukiyo-e tradition. As the viewer looks more closely anachronisms begin to be seen. These anachronistic touches are a definitive feature of Teraoka's style.

Hair a mess and skin spotted with lesions, the Geisha clutches condoms in one hand and a cherry-tree twig in the other. These three symbols-lesions, condoms and twig-are a potent symbolic combination. The viewer is forced to address the image of a geisha, a symbol of perfection and beauty in