Masami Teraoka

Masami Teraoka (born 1936) is a Japanese-American contemporary artist. His work includes ukiyo-e-influenced woodcuts and paintings.

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 and from 1964–68 attended 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. Masami's wife Lynda Hess is also a painter.

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.

In the 1980s, Teraoka shifted palette and scale to depict AIDS as a subject, transforming his ukiyo-e derived paintings into a darker realm. Since the late 1990s, he has been producing large-scale narrative paintings inspired by well-known Renaissance paintings, rather than by Japanese woodblock prints. These paintings reference 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.

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