Masami Teraoka was born in 1936 in Onomichi, Hiroshima, Japan. He graduated in 1959 with a Bachelor of Arts in Aesthetics from Kwansei Gakuin University, Hyogo, Japan. Teraoka continued his education in Los Angeles, earning a Bachelor of Arts (1964) and a Master of Arts (1968) from Otis College of Art and Design. In 2016, Otis awarded Teraoka an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts.
Teraoka’s work integrates reality with the surreal, humor with social commentary, and the historical with the contemporary. His early watercolors often focus on the cultural meeting of East and West evident in series that began in the 1970s such as “McDonald’s Hamburgers Invading Japan,” “New Views of Mt. Fuji,” and “31 Flavors Invading Japan.” The works on paper that define this period of his career reflect the impact of economic and cultural globalization. While sexuality is a recurring subject in his work, his representation of sex shifted from positive depictions of free-love in the 1970s and early 1980s, to concern for the spread of HIV in his work of the mid-1980s, and outrage over sexual abuse in institutions like the Catholic Church, later made visible through movements like #metoo. The medium during the “AIDS Series” period shifted from watercolor on paper to watercolor on canvas, enabling him to work at a large scale to address the enormity of the social and health crisis on communities impacted by the disease.
In the 1990s Teraoka’s medium shifted again. The narrative, oil paintings of this period until today engage in commentary and critique of the Church and other institutions that harbor sexual predators and foster sexual abuse. His most recent works also take on patriarchy, hypocrisy in American politics, and social and political repression in Russia under Vladimir Putin. His work of this era is often rendered in oil on panel, inspired by gilded Renaissance triptychs. He continues with a narrative approach like that of his earlier, ukiyo-e inspired work, but rendered in a Western-inspired style with baroque flair that references European ecclesiastical art. In 2017, Teraoka produced an adaptation of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest in collaboration Viktoria Naraxsa of Russian activist collective Pussy Riot, which premiered in Hawai’i. Since their collaboration, Naraxsa has been featured as a protagonist in Teraoka’s paintings, interacting with Pope Francis, Vladimir Putin, and Teraoka’s former collaborator, the geisha Momotaro.
Teraoka’s work has been the subject of more than 70 solo exhibitions, including the 2017 solo survey Floating Realities: The Art of Masami Teraoka at California State University, Fullerton, which was accompanied by a comprehensive monograph. Teraoka’s work has also been featured in solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art; Arthur M. Sackler Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution; Asian Art Museum; Yale University Art Gallery; Honolulu Museum of Art; and the New Albion Gallery of New South Wales, amongst other venues. His work has also been exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Bronx Museum, amongst other venues.
His work was recently featured in Japanese Prints in Transition: From the Floating World to the Modern World, an exhibition with an accompanying catalogue at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. This fall, Teraoka’s watercolors and prints will be in Spirit House, an exhibition at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, accompanied by a catalogue. In 2023, Teraoka’s iconic folding screen titled Makiki Heights Disaster (1988), a centerpiece of his “AIDS Series,” was acquired by the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; in September 2024, this work will be featured in the major exhibition Masami Teraoka and Japanese Ukiyo-e Prints, a survey that presents key examples of Teraoka’s ukiyo-e style works alongside traditional ukiyo-e prints, delving into their visual, strategic, and thematic connections. Leading ukiyo-e artists featured include Utagawa Kunisada, Katsushika Hokusai, Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Toyohara Kunichika, and Tsukioka Yoshitoshi.
Teraoka’s work is represented in more than 50 public collections worldwide, including the Tate Modern; National Gallery of Australia; Gallery of Modern Art in Scotland; Whitney Museum of American Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Library of Congress; Smithsonian American Art Museum; Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; Walker Art Center; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Blanton Museum of Art; Honolulu Museum of Art; Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College; Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon; and Crocker Art Museum, among others.
In 2019, the Whitney Museum of American Art, acquired a significant watercolor by Teraoka, Los Angeles Sushi Ghost Tales/Fish Woman and the Artist I (1979) in celebration of the 40th anniversary of the artist’s solo museum exhibition. In 2015, the artist was awarded the Lee Krasner Award by the Pollock-Krasner Foundation in recognition of outstanding lifetime artistic achievement.
Teraoka’s work has been featured in multiple publications, including the monographs: Masami Teraoka, published by the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1979; Waves and Plagues, published by Chronicle Books in 1988, Ascending Chaos: The Art of Masami Teraoka 1966 – 2006, published by Chronicle Books in 2006, and Floating Realities: The Art of Masami Teraoka, published by California State University, Fullerton in 2018.
The artist lives and works in O‘ahu, Hawai’i, and has been represented by Catharine Clark Gallery since 1998.
