Honolulu Weekly • Book Review
June 26, 2007

A Fine Line
by Marcia Morse

A new book about the work of Masami Teraoka shows the artist at his best: on the line between social commentator and sharp critic.

The rhetoric of “East meets West” is so firmly embedded in common parlance that we may not reflect fully on the implications of this trope of cultural encounter. For that reason, among many others, a newly published study of the art of Masami Teraoka is both timely and welcome. Ascending Chaos: The Art of Masami Teraoka 1966–2006 is a comprehensive review of the artist’s work to date, with numerous full-color plates of his paintings and prints and three substantial essays that place the work in historical and critical context.

In the domain of art books, Ascending Chaos is, first and quite simply, a beautiful book. It is a sweet reminder of the pleasures of holding a book in hand to look at and read, in an era when the form and content of other virtual modes of communication are often, quite literally, insubstantial. While the book as artifact might seem tangential to more weighty matters, it nevertheless serves as a token of one of Teraoka’s most enduring themes—the exquisite physicality of the bodies we inhabit: contested terrain, common ground.

Catharine Clark, the gallery owner who has represented Teraoka in San Francisco since the mid-1990s, provides not only the book’s introduction, but also its essential vision as a project that, she suggests, can serve as a precursor to a complete catalogue of the artist’s works. In particular, this project needs to deal insightfully with the significant shift in Teraoka’s work, beginning in the early 1990s, from ukiyo-e-inspired watercolors to large-scale oils on canvas that embrace the conventions of Western pictorial representation, all in the service of cultural and social observation and criticism that has grown more biting over time. That historical and analytic perspective is ably provided by Alison Bing, Eleanor Heartney and Kathryn A. Hoffmann, who together map the diverse and interwoven aspects of Teraoka’s work.

Bing’s essay “Masami-za: The Narrative Art Theater of Masami Teraoka” provides the most comprehensive overview of the artist’s development, as he inhabited, as well as created a world in which “cultures and concepts may shift at any time, and collide at will.” While one might find satisfaction and delight in uncovering the particular iconographic linkages that are part of Teraoka’s aesthetic arsenal—the ghosts of Kunisada and Hokusai, the dramatic license of Kabuki, erotic prints (shunga) in the earlier work, and the religio-political programs of Renaissance and Baroque art in the later work—in the end it is about a mix that is uniquely Teraoka’s, somehow in keeping for a citizen whose home culture has made high art as well as astute politics of integration of the foreign.

Bing, writing in an engaging, sometimes hip style, captures the sense of playful double-entendre present in Teraoka’s early work, focusing as it did on the loosening of sexual constraints and the incursions of consumer culture. She also makes a convincing case for the artist’s ability to respond with immediacy and rightness of visual language to other, increasingly dark themes—environmental disasters, the AIDS pandemic, the rise of religious conservatism and its underlying hypocrisy, exposed in the wake of sexual abuses—that had at their core the increasingly perilous position of embodied human existence. If Teraoka’s complex stylistic matrix makes him somewhat anachronistic, the content of his work has always been timely, and we believe again in the power of narrative painting, expressed in the language of the body.

Eleanor Heartney’s essay “Masami Teraoka’s Inferno: Tales for an Era of Moral Chaos” is a particularly compelling examination of the fusion of art and politics in Teraoka’s work, as he confronts, with apocalyptic weight and elaborate visual orchestration (lessons learned from Bosch and the Baroque), the darker facets of human existence that are lamentably persistent, new only in their specific cultural markers. Heartney’s concluding analysis suggests that beyond narration per se, which may turn in the direction of journalistic reportage or toward more personal account, the strength and durability of Teraoka’s work lies in its engagement of allegory, by which “…the viewer is drawn into a consideration of the issues at hand by a story that seems at first to be leading somewhere else.” In this context, the distances between a medieval inquisition and Abu Ghraib, between clerical and political malfeasance, between the repression and exploitation of female sexuality, between the eschatological and the scatological, will dissolve, and the facade of culture will crumble, brought down by the weight of evidence the artist piles on and stirs up.

Kathryn A. Hoffmann also cites the “…bacchanalia of images” that characterizes Teraoka’s most recent work in her essay “The West Looked Up the Skirts of Venus: Myth and Social Commentary in Masami Teraoka’s Art,” coming to focus on the artist’s deployment of women’s bodies in the construction of “…his kaleidoscopic vision of modern Western misogyny and desire.” In particular, Hoffmann gets at the deep-rooted ambivalence with which female bodies are regarded, evident in Teraoka’s devilishly inventive litany of abuse of bodies that otherwise glow with a transcendent luminosity. In a sense this preoccupation with the female body completes the circle of Teraoka’s work, which has come a long way from the pop images of the floating world of Los Angeles in the 1960s. If “everywoman” is the target of abuse, she may also be, as Bing suggests, the redemptive symbol of love.

While Ascending Chaos doesn’t provide all the answers (one wants to know more about Teraoka’s evolution in style and materials for example or, on a more personal note, about his partner and muse Lynda Hess who emerges as an iconic presence in his work.) For that we may need to wait for a subsequent, ultimately definitive volume. But we can be assured that, given the nature of the terrain Teraoka has staked out, there will be no dearth of new dark matter for him to explore

Art Asia Pacific • No. 54 July/August 2007
Book Review by Eric C. Shiner

Masami Teraoka is best known for his watercolor paintings masterfully updating the themes and textures of Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints to critique contemporary society. However, the artist has worked in a broad and, over time, radically-shifting the subject matter, with altar-like oil paintings borrowing from Renaissance religious art. Teraoka receives handsome treatment in Chronicle Books’ comprehensive monograph of his work, Ascending Chaos, which, anticipating eventual catalogue raisonne, includes
A catalog of graphic work from 1972 – 2006 in its addenda. The book’s rich colorplates are interwoven throughout essays contributed by three art and culture writers, Alison Bing, Eleanor Heartney and Kathryn A, Hoffman. The reproductions range from thumbnail size to full page and even gatefold spreads. Texts and design alike add a veneer of gravitas to an artist who has been unstinting in his racy, candid commentary on sexual experimentation, cross-cultural exploitation and moral and political hypocrisies.

Teraoka was born in Japan in 1936 in the town of Onomichi, between Osaka and Hiroshima, and raised in a kimono shop, the family trade. He studied aesthetics at Kwansei Gakuin University in Kansai, but departed for Los Angeles in the early 1960s, where he earned additional undergraduate and masters degree at the Otis Art Institute. The pollution in Los Angeles eventually prompted him to move to Oahu, Hawaii, where he is now based. The landscape and culture of both Los Angeles and Oahu weigh heavily in Teraoka’s art, as do the central figures and event of the life, split between Japan and US.

Alison Bing’s sprawling treatise on the artist’s self styled Masami-za, or “Masami narrative art theater,” guides readers through the bulk of Teraoka’s oeuvre and biography. We see sexual liberation-induced visions of ecstasy, as in Wave Series/Tattooed Woman at Kaneohe Bay I (1984), which shows a nude diving woman lasciviously entangled in the arms of an octopus, recalling Hokusai’s iconic erotic print Pearl Diver and Two Octopi (c.1814). Other works achieve a double edged sense of introspection. In Fuck You Series/Gail and Grey Hair and Fuck You Series #4/Gail’s Finger Game (both 1972), a blond woman in a kimono “examines” herself at her boudoir. Teraoka employs self-deprecating humor as well. Venice Nude Beach/Woman and Bicycle (1975) has the artist in the role of a wondering monk who is turned inside out at the sight of a realistically-rendered larger-than-life woman as she casually tosses aside her bikini top and stands fingering herself. The sharp lines of the painting and abstracted grey background, bisected by a blue bar, suggest parallels with both Japanese youga (Western-style painting) and American minimalism.

However, the droll playfulness of these early works give way to more social commentary with the “AIDS Series,” peopled by ghostly figures and monsters borrowed from Edo period graphic compendia, and proceeds from there to violent, sadistic visions inspired by Christian depictions of sufferers in hell. Heartney and Hoffman delve deeper into this transition from floating world to Inquisition in their essays, punctuated by images such as Nigh Vision Inquisition (1997), a four-paneled folding screen that shows a priest with night vision goggles probing a woman from behind as naked onlookers watch in terror. A flaccid giant pink penis extends from right hand-side panel just above another night goggled priest following a similar “interrogation” on his laptop computer screen. The hard edges of the ukiyo-e style are replaced with frenetic brushwork and gestural details---spurts of red paint suggesting flames or blood.

Visually, Ascending Chaos is stunning and troubling. The reader is consistently taken aback by artist’s depictions of raw sexuality and bloody violence. Beautiful geisha sexually gratifying themselves, Botticelli’s Venus being strip-searched at Heathrow airport and the artist himself cloaked in the guise of perverted voyeur here and feminized subject there attest to Teraoka’s lifelong attempt to document and critique human failings and absurdities while celebrating the joys of sex and carnival.

Taken together, the three essays in the book are informed, well-written and rich accounts of Teraoka’s career, yet too closely mirror each other in style and content: a single essay would have sufficed. The writers’ over-analysis of the same tropes and influences---the wrongs of war, ills of society, the hypocrisy of religion---weakens the power of the images themselves. Teraoka could be the Dante of our times, unleashing infernos that compel us to engage with society in all its manifestations: evil, angelic and everything in between. In this book, ultimately, the pictures themselves are the best guide to the underground river.

Films and Books on the Art
The Virginia Quarterly Review
A National Journal of Lliterature and Discussion
Publisher: University of Virginia, VA
VQR fall issue focuses on 9/11 political issues which includes my most recent work (five images) and text.
Modern Infeno: Post 9/11 Paintings by Masami Teraoka

Tate Modern Publication, London
Print Matters: The Kenneth E. Tyler Gift
November, 2004
This book includes my print Hawaii Snorkel Series/ Catfish Envy.
Tate Modern
Bankside, SF1-9TG
London
www.tate.org.uk/modern