Masami Teraoka

Last updated
Masami Teraoka
Masami Teraoka, 2011.JPG
Teraoka in 2011
Born1936
Onomichi, Hiroshima Prefecture
EducationKwansei Gakuin University
Otis College of Art and Design
AwardsNational Endowment for the Arts
American Academy of Arts and Letters
Signature
Signature of Masami Teraoka.JPG
Website masamiteraoka.com

Masami Teraoka (born 1936) is an American contemporary artist. His work includes Ukiyo-e -influenced woodcut prints and paintings in watercolor and oil. He is known for work that merges traditional Edo-style aesthetics with icons of American culture.

Contents

Education

Teraoka was born in the town of Onomichi in Hiroshima Prefecture. He studied 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. From 1964 to 1968 he attended and graduated from the Otis Art Institute, now the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, where he received a B.F.A. and M.F.A. He received an honorary doctorate in the fine arts in 2016 from the Otis College of Art and Design. [1]

Works

'Hanauma Bay Series: Ronin Samuri', watercolor by Masami Teraoka, 1982, Hawaii State Art Museum 'Hanauma Bay Series - Ronin Samuri', 1982, watercolor by --Masami Teraoka--, 1982, --Hawaii State Art Museum--.jpg
'Hanauma Bay Series: Ronin Samuri', watercolor by Masami Teraoka, 1982, Hawaii State Art Museum
The Cloisters / Tsunami by Masami Teraoka, 2002-2005, Honolulu Museum of Art The Cloisters - Tsunami by Masami Teraoka, Honolulu Museum of Art.jpg
The Cloisters / Tsunami by Masami Teraoka, 2002-2005, Honolulu Museum of Art

Teraoka's combines merges traditional Edo-style aesthetics with icons of American culture. 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. Series such as McDonald's Hamburgers Invading Japan and 31 Flavors Invading Japan characterize themes in the work in this time period. These pieces blended reality with fantasy, humor with commentary, history with the present. [1]

In the 1980s, Teraoka shifted palette and scale to depict AIDS as a subject, transforming his ukiyo-e derived paintings into a darker realm. In 1989 during a trip to Australia, he realized that the general public as well as some medical practitioners did not fully understand the impact the virus could have on the Australian populace. He created watercolors based on traditional woodblock prints that depicted kitsune foxes who represent, in Japanese folklore, divine entities who operate as messengers. [1]

Since the late 1990s, he has been producing large-scale narrative paintings inspired by well-known Renaissance paintings, rather than by Japanese woodblock prints. [1] These paintings reference modern day social and political issues, such as the September 11 attacks and abuse in the Catholic Church. The Cloisters / Tsunami in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art, depicts Towers of Babel as the twin towers of the World Trade Center and fallen priests. This painting also includes a self-portrait in the left upper corner. [2] The series also depicts the institutionalized sexual abuse within the Catholic Church. [3]

Teraoka has been the subject of more than 70 solo exhibitions, [1] many of which have traveled extensively, including those organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1980; The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu (now known as the Honolulu Museum of Art Spalding House) in 1988; and the Yale University Art Gallery in 1998. In 1996, he was featured in a solo exhibition at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution and in 1997 at the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco. [4]

Teraoka has received numerous grants, fellowships and awards for his work. He was twice honored by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York and received two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. [4]

Monographs

In 1988 the University of California Press published Waves and Plagues: The Art of Masami Teraoka. [5] In 1997, Masami Teraoka: From Tradition to Technology, the Floating World was published by the University of Michigan Press. [6] A comprehensive monograph on the artist was published in 2006 by Chronicle Books. [4]

Collections

His work is in more than 50 public collections worldwide, including the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA; the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D. C.; the Honolulu Museum of Art, Hawaii; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the National Portrait Gallery, Washington D. C.; Tate Modern, London, England; the Queensland Art Gallery/GOMA, Brisbane, Australia; the Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow, Scotland; and the Singapore Art Museum, Singapore. [4]

Personal life

Terakoa is married to Lynda Hess, and lives in Hawaii. They have a daughter. [1]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Utamaro</span> Japanese artist (1753–1806)

Kitagawa Utamaro was a Japanese artist. He is one of the most highly regarded designers of ukiyo-e woodblock prints and paintings, and is best known for his bijin ōkubi-e "large-headed pictures of beautiful women" of the 1790s. He also produced nature studies, particularly illustrated books of insects.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ukiyo-e</span> Genre of Japanese art which flourished from the 17th through 19th centuries

Ukiyo-e is a genre of Japanese art that flourished from the 17th through 19th centuries. Its artists produced woodblock prints and paintings of such subjects as female beauties; kabuki actors and sumo wrestlers; scenes from history and folk tales; travel scenes and landscapes; flora and fauna; and erotica. The term ukiyo-e translates as 'picture[s] of the floating world'.

<i>Shunga</i> Japanese erotic art

Shunga (春画) is a type of Japanese erotic art typically executed as a kind of ukiyo-e, often in woodblock print format. While rare, there are also extant erotic painted handscrolls which predate ukiyo-e. Translated literally, the Japanese word shunga means picture of spring; "spring" is a common euphemism for sex.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hasui Kawase</span> Japanese artist (1883–1957)

Hasui Kawase was a Japanese artist who was one of 20th century Japan's most important and prolific printmakers. He was a prominent designer of the shin-hanga movement, whose artists depicted traditional subjects with a style influenced by Western art. Like many earlier ukiyo-e prints, Hasui's works were commonly landscapes, but displayed atmospheric effects and natural lighting.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Shinsui Itō</span>

Shinsui Itō was the pseudonym of a Nihonga painter and ukiyo-e woodblock print artist in Taishō- and Shōwa-period Japan. He was one of the great names of the shin-hanga art movement, which revitalized the traditional art after it began to decline with the advent of photography in the early 20th century. His real name was Itō Hajime.

<i>Shin-hanga</i> Japanese art movement

Shin-hanga was an art movement in early 20th-century Japan, during the Taishō and Shōwa periods, that revitalized the traditional ukiyo-e art rooted in the Edo and Meiji periods. It maintained the traditional ukiyo-e collaborative system where the artist, carver, printer, and publisher engaged in division of labor, as opposed to the parallel sōsaku-hanga movement.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Torii Kiyonaga</span> Japanese ukiyo-e artist (1752-1815)

Torii Kiyonaga was a Japanese ukiyo-e artist of the Torii school. Originally Sekiguchi Shinsuke, the son of an Edo bookseller, from Motozaimokuchō Itchōme in Edo, he took on Torii Kiyonaga as an art name. Although not biologically related to the Torii family, he became head of the group after the death of his adoptive father and teacher Torii Kiyomitsu.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Koryūsai</span>

Isoda Koryūsai was a Japanese ukiyo-e print designer and painter active from 1769 to 1790.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hiroki Morinoue</span> American painter

Hiroki Morinoue is an American artist of Japanese descent who has helped to pioneer in the United States the fusion of western Impressionism with modern Japanese design.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Charles W. Bartlett</span> English painter and printmaker (1860–1940)

Charles William Bartlett was an English painter and printmaker who settled in Hawaii.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Chin Young</span> American painter (1909–1997)

John Chin Young 容澤泉 (1909–1997) was a painter who was born in Honolulu, Hawaii on March 26, 1909. He was the son of Chinese immigrants and began drawing at the age of eight, stimulated by Chinese calligraphy, which he learned in Chinese language school. Young had his first and only art lessons while a student at President William McKinley High School in Honolulu. Thereafter, his art was entirely self-taught. Young is best known for his Zen-like depictions of horses, paintings of children, and abstractions. Over the years, he acquired an important collection of ancient Asian art, which he donated to the Honolulu Museum of Art and the University of Hawaii at Manoa as the John Young Museum. John Chin Young died in 1997 at the age of 88. His daughter Debbie Young is also a painter residing in Hawaii.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Melville Kelly</span> American painter

John Melville Kelly (1879–1962) was an American painter and printmaker.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John E. Buck</span> American sculptor

John Buck is an American sculptor and printmaker who was born in Ames, Iowa.

Tetsuo Ochikubo (1923–1975), also known as Bob Ochikubo, was a Japanese-American painter, sculpture, and printmaker who was born in Waipahu, Hawaii, Honolulu county, Hawaii. During the Second World War, he served with the 100th Battalion of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. After being discharged from the Army, he studied painting and design at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and at the Art Students League of New York. In 1953, he spent a year in Japan, studying traditional brush painting and connecting with his ancestry. He worked at Tamarind Institute in the 1960s and is best known for his entirely abstract paintings and lithographs. Along with Satoru Abe, Bumpei Akaji, Edmund Chung, Jerry T. Okimoto, James Park, and Tadashi Sato, Ochikubo was a member of the Metcalf Chateau, a group of seven Asian-American artists with ties to Honolulu. Ochikubo died in Kawaihae, Hawaii in 1975.

Tadashi Nakayama was a Japanese woodblock print artist, working in a style that combines influences from traditional Japanese ukiyo-e prints and Western painting.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ishikawa Toyonobu</span> Japanese print artist, 1711–1785

Ishikawa Toyonobu was a Japanese ukiyo-e print artist. He is sometimes said to have been the same person as Nishimura Shigenobu, a contemporary ukiyo-e artist and student of Nishimura Shigenaga about whom very little is known.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Utagawa Toyoharu</span> Japanese artist (1735–1814)

Utagawa Toyoharu was a Japanese artist in the ukiyo-e genre, known as the founder of the Utagawa school and for his uki-e pictures that incorporated Western-style geometrical perspective to create a sense of depth.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lilian May Miller</span> American artist

Lilian May Miller was an American painter, woodblock printmaker and poet born in Tokyo, Japan. In the world of art she marked her place with imagery, while she attended presentations in traditional kimonos, and signed her paintings with a monogram.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eishi</span> Japanese ukiyo-e artist

Chōbunsai Eishi was a Japanese ukiyo-e artist. His last name was Hosoda (細田). His first name was Tokitomi (時富). His common name was Taminosuke (民之丞) and later Yasaburo (弥三郎). Pupil of Kano Eisen'in Michinobu. Born as the first son of direct vassal of the Shogunate, a well-off samurai family that was part of the Fujiwara clan. Eishi was a vassal of the Shogunate with a generous stipend of 500 'koku' of rice. Eishi left his employ with the Shōgun Ieharu to pursue art. His early works were prints, mostly Bijin-ga portraits of tall, thin, graceful beauties in the original style established by himself akin to Kiyonaga and Utamaro. He established his own school and was a rival to Utamaro. He was a prolific painter, and from 1801 gave up print designing to devote himself to painting.

<i>Fujin Tomari-kyaku no Zu</i> Color triptych print by Kitagawa Utamaro

Fujin Tomari-kyaku no Zu Sanmai-tsuzuki is a triptych print by the Japanese ukiyo-e artist Kitagawa Utamaro. It depicts a group of women within a mosquito net preparing for an overnight visit.

References

Footnotes

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 "Masami Teraoka: Contemporary Issues Through a Ukiyo-e Lens". Chapman University. Retrieved 17 December 2022.
  2. Teraoka, Masami, lecture given at the Honolulu Museum of Art
  3. "Masami Teraoka: Contemporary Narratie Work". MasamiTeraoka. Retrieved 17 December 2022.
  4. 1 2 3 4 Clark, Catharine; Bing, Alison; Heartney, Eleanor; Hoffman, Kathryn (2006). Ascending chaos: the art of Masami Teraoka. San Francisco: Chronicle Books. ISBN   0-8118-5097-8.
  5. Stevenson, John; Taeaoka, Masami (1997). Masami Teraoka: From Tradition to Technology, the Floating World Comes of Age. University of Michigan Press. ISBN   9780295976518.