Masami Teraoka

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Masami Teraoka (born 1936) is a contemporary artist known for his watercolor paintings which mimic use of the traditional Japanese woodblock prints. His pieces blend reality with fantasy, humor with commentary, history with the present.

Masami 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, and from 1964-68 at 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 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.

In the 1980s, Teraoka shifted to depicting AIDS as a subject, transforming his ukiyo-e derived paintings into a darker realm.

His work has been presented in shows across America and Japan, and is held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The San Francisco Fine Arts Museum's Achenbach Collection, the Oakland Art Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Smithsonian Institution, the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art in Australia and the Contemporary Museum in Oahu, Hawaii.

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.