| Exhibitions |
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Sonoma State University Art Gallery Press Release: MASAMI TERAOKA CONVERSATION
AND BOOKSIGNING - Teraoka, an artist originally from Japan whose work pays homage
to-and critiques-the traditions of both Japanese and European art,
will not only discuss the works in his book, Ascending Chaos, but
will discuss how his work evolved from Ukiyo-e narrative, providing
both a social and personal context, and will discuss inspired him
to arrive at the imagery in his current work. A Q&A period will
follow, along with a light reception. Masami
Teraoka: Cloisters' Confessions and Kazuo Kadonaga April 19 - May 24, 2008 Available publications at the gallery:
Masami Teraoka: Cloisters' Confessions catalog cover:
Contact: Catharine Clark Gallery
News Marjan Vayghan curator conceived a show six years ago and called it Building Bridges. Vayghan's primary intention was to build a dialogue between the United States and Iran. She hoped to paint a different, positive picture in and about Iran- her home country- going beyond its Bush administration label of "Axis of Evil." She wanted to build a cultural bridge between the two countries in order to promote peace. This international show includes Abbas Kiarostami, Susan Lacy, Farideh Lashaee, Ahmad Nadalian, Masami Teraoka and Bill Viola among other US and Iranian artists.
Excerpt from Marjan Vaghan's note regarding my work: Contact: * * * * * * * * * * New Location May 2007!!! Catharine Clark Gallery San Francisco, CA : Catharine Clark Gallery presents Venus and Pope, a solo exhibition of new oil paintings by Masami Teraoka. Debuting to the public concurrently with the exhibition is Ascending Chaos: The Art of Masami Teraoka 1966 - 2006, a forty year career retrospective publication. Published by Chronicle Books, the book features 175 color plates, a complete catalogue of Teraoka's graphic works from 1977 to 2006, an introduction by Catharine Clark, and essays by Alison Bing, Eleanor Heartney, and Kathryn A. Hoffman. Advanced purchase of the book, signed by Masami Teraoka are available from Catharine Clark Gallery for $ 60. Masami Teraoka will be present for the opening reception. Featured in the Video Project Room is Machina , a single channel animated video by New York based artist Claudia Hart. A reception for both artists is Thursday, February 1, 5:30-7:30pm. Masami Teraoka is widely known for early works that combine the aesthetics of traditional Japanese Edo period woodblock prints, or ukiyo-e , with products and cultural references informed by Western society. Some of his most popular early works feature popular iconography of Western corporate culture such as McDonald's hamburgers, ice cream cones from Baskin Robbins ( 31 Flavors Invading Japan ) and Trojan Gold Coin Condoms in combination with the aesthetics and compositional devices used by Edo era master artists such as Hokusai and Kunisada. His newest paintings expand upon Teraoka's prescient preoccupation with globalism and hypocrisy, and his more recent concerns about American life post 9-11, and the Catholic church sex abuse scandal, through stylistic appropriation of early European Renaissance painting. Not only does he adopt the compositions and palette of Renaissance painting, but he also uses golf-leaf triptych frames to house the multi-panel paintings.
The work of Masami Teraoka has been critically reviewed and exhibited internationally. He has had solo exhibitions the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, New York), the Asian Art Museum (San Francisco, California), and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution (Washington D. C.), among others. Most recently, his work was included in the Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art at Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia. His work is featured in the permanent collection of more than 50 international institutions, including Tate Modern (London, United Kingdom), the Museum of Modern Art (New York, New York), de Young/Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (San Francisco, California), and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, New York). He has been represented by Catharine Clark Gallery since 1997.
The Palo Alto Art Center(PAAC) "Correspondence: Masami Teraoka & Ukiyo-e," selected from a Palo Alto collection, explores the humourous and poignant contemporary work by Japanese American artist Masami Teraoka in juxtaposition with Ukiyo-e woodblock prints by Japanese masters who inspired Teraoka. Teraoka identifies his work as "narrative art theater," and has mined the iconography, vibrant color, and compositional elements seen in Ukiyo-e woodblock prints by mimicking formal components in watercolors for his satirical commentaries. Ukiyo-e, or ‘pictures of the floating world,' celebrated buoyant pleasures in genre pictures of everyday life, landscape views, and erotica in Edo Period Japan. The main protagonists were beautiful courtesans and geisha, swashbuckling samurai, and dashing Kabuki actors. Teraoka noted a historic parallel in the hedonism and consumerism in Edo Japan and Los Angeles , where he received his MFA from Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles . In the 1970s, he peppered stylistic parodies of Ukiyo-e's vibrant dramas with Western Pop Art details for cultural critique. Identifying his own work as “ Narrative Art Theatre ,” he provocatively cast his self-portraits and Western figures in the sensual flourish of tattoos and kimonos, while mimicking special surface effects from Ukiyo-e woodblocks in large-scale, virtuoso watercolors. He adopted the Ukiyo-e practice of calligraphy, as a device to insert hidden meaning, and staged his compelling pieces with motifs and symbols from Japanese legends, including blue ghosts and perilous demons. After a close friend's child received a transfusion contaminated with HIV in 1986, his work turned to Bosch-like allegories. With seductive beauty, Teraoka's work work lures the viewer to contemplate contemporary issues, including environmental pollution, cultures in collision, international tourism and terrorism, and AIDS. Born in 1936 in Japan , Teraoka earned a BA in Aesthetics from Kwanesi Gakuin University , Kobe , before attending the Otis Art Institute. His work has been featured in numerous one-person exhibitions, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It is featured in major museum collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The National Museum of American Art, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco , San Jose Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Walker Art Center, and The Contemporary Museum in Honolulu . The exhibition is presented in conjunction with the Chronicle Books publication of Ascending Chaos: The Art of Masami Teraoka, 1996-2006, and a concurrent exhibition of the artist's current work at the Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco, opening on February 1. Copyright © 2006 Palo Alto Art Center Foundation. All Rights Reserved.
Upcoming Group Shows in 2006- 07 | ||||||||||||
My painting Tale of a Thousand
Condoms/Geisha and Skeleton is exhibited currently in the American
Art Museum/Smithsonian's permanent exhibition, Washington DC. Visual Politics: The Art of Engagement More info/articles about Smithsonian Art Museums Reopening and Visual
Politics: The Art of Engagement New York Times Smithsonian Museums Reopen, Telling America's Story Through Ideas and Ideals WASHINGTON, June 26 — When two of the Smithsonian Institution's pre-eminent museums reopen on Saturday after six years of renovation, visitors may be stunned to learn that they were once competing installations with little more in common than the subdued building that housed them. The American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery, joint tenants of the venerated United States Patent Office, now share an interior reimagined with wider exhibition space, brighter light, soaring arches and common entrances for their intersecting interpretations of United States history. The $300 million redesign, paid for by Congress and private donations, has left the museums separate in name only. A proliferation of offices and interior walls that once narrowed viewing space are gone, giving way to floor plans that sweep visitors from one museum to the other and back again. On the first floor, for example, the American Art Museum occupies the west side, and the Portrait Gallery the east. On the second floor they switch positions. As they collaborate to tell America's story through ideas and ideals, one conveys it thematically, the other through portraiture, each celebrating the complex forces and figures that have shaped the country since pre-Colonial times. There are Charles Willson Peales, Gilbert Stuarts and George Catlins; pieces by Mathew Brady, Winslow Homer and Georgia O'Keeffe. In addition to 1,800 works displayed in the major exhibitions, most of them returning but some recently acquired, 3,300 more are shown in new, stacks-like spaces, with rows and rows of glass cabinets on the upper floors. All together, five times as many works are on public view as there were before the building, one of Washington's oldest, closed in 2000. The core exhibitions are generally laid out in chronological order, inviting the viewer to chart the country's growth as much through artistic evolution as through outward expansion and political events. In the American Art Museum lush agricultural landscapes of the founding period give way to horrors of the Civil War, then to stark scenes of industrialization and to the whimsies of modern life. The Portrait Gallery, once mainly the province of dead white men, still has its presidents — the only complete set in Washington beyond the White House — but now pays tribute to the country's diversity. There are special exhibitions, like photographs of monuments and memorials to show how America remembers its heroes; a room of prints by William H. Johnson reflecting the lives of ordinary African-Americans; and a gallery celebrating civil rights, gay rights and rights of the disabled. The old "10 years dead" rule has been banished, so we see activists like Gloria Steinem and Rosa Parks; writers including Toni Morrison, Tom Wolfe and John Updike; musicians like Ray Charles and Lionel Hampton; and athletes like Lance Armstrong and Shaquille O'Neal. Each museum has its stars. In the Portrait Gallery Stuart's full-length "Lansdowne" portrait depicts George Washington near the end of his second term. It was previously on loan from its British owner, but the gallery bought it during renovations. The presidential gallery also includes the last known photograph of Abraham Lincoln, taken just a month before his death, and Elaine de Kooning's abstract of a somber John F. Kennedy. In the American Art Museum O'Keeffe's "Manhattan," a sharp-edged skyline painted in 1932 that includes three randomly placed roses as if to suggest her future direction, enjoys a prominent space. So does a huge taming-the-West mural by Thomas Hart Benton that curators rescued from a more obscure space in the museum. A newly acquired neon map of the United States by Nam June Paik, with sounds and pictures emanating from each of the 50 states, gets a room of its own. Some works poke and prod, perhaps hoping to spur something more than debate: a little discomfort. The American Art Museum's contemporary collection includes a Japanese geisha painted by Masami Teraoka in 1989. On close inspection, you can see that she is opening a package of condoms with her teeth as she gazes toward a half-seen skeleton. Elizabeth Broun, director of the American Art Museum, dismissed any notion that conservatives might find the image troubling. "I can't imagine anyone in our society thinking it's inappropriate to acknowledge AIDS and its impact," she said. "Art is not always about pretty things. It's about who we are, what happened to us and how our lives are affected." And just when a viewer might feel charmed by the finalists in a Portrait Gallery competition, which required that the subject be someone the artist knew, an entry from Steve DeFrank of New Haven underlines the museum's brave new energy. His "Mom and Dad," a 1960's-era representation of his parents made with small, illuminated Lite-Brite bulbs, shows them wearing only gold chains, watches, suntans and smiles. The presidential gallery offers much in the way of contrast. To one side of a corner is the elder George Bush, looking formal and altogether presidential. To the other is a twice-as-large Bill Clinton, looking a tad rakish. "People read size for importance," said Marc Pachter, director of the Portrait Gallery. "But it's totally accidental." In the renovation the museums also carved out new public areas like an overstock display space conceived as a way to put more of the museum's permanent collection on view, even if objects are unmarked and crowded together. Many are as eye-catching as those shown in the more formal galleries. Nearby computer terminals provide a discussion of each piece and the artists' biographies. And in glass-enclosed conservation centers on the upper floors, visitors can watch museum personnel treat and preserve works for future display or storage. The building opened in 1840 as the Patent Office but served other needs — a Civil War hospital, the site of Lincoln's second inaugural ball — before the Civil Service Commission took it over in 1932. Thirty years later it won National Historic Landmark status. The museums opened in 1968 and survived a steady decay of the neighborhood, before its recent rebound. Now they sit in the heart of this city's growing commercial center, steps away from three Metro lines. Museum officials say they are bracing for huge crowds just ahead of the Fourth of July holiday. "Both museums are telling stories of America," Ms. Broun reflected, "one through the lens of biography and individuals, the other through the lens of ideas. When the lenses converge, they help us understand who we are as people." The American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery reopen on Saturday. Open 11:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. daily, except Christmas; free. Eighth and F Streets, NW, Washington; (202) 633-1000. Visual Politics: The Art of Engagement | ||||||||||||
| Group show | ||||||||||||
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| 2004 | Solo show Masami Teraoka | |||||||||||
Carleton College Art Gallery, Northfield, MN | ||||||||||||
| Group shows | ||||||||||||
| Finesse | ||||||||||||
Catharine Clark Gallery, July 1 - July 31st | ||||||||||||
| This and That at the MAC , 9/11 | ||||||||||||
McKinney Avenue Contemporary, Dallas, TX | ||||||||||||
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| 2005 |
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| Group shows | ||||||||||||
| California New Old Masters | ||||||||||||
Gallery C, Hermosa Beach, CA | ||||||||||||
Robyn Buntin of Honolulu, Honolulu, HI | ||||||||||||
| Masami Teraoka: American Kabuki Oishiiwa | ||||||||||||
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A four panel screen will be featured at |
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| 2006 | ||||||||||||
| Otis: Nine Decades of Los Angeles Art | ||||||||||||
January 20 - April 2, 2006 |
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Copyright © Masami
Teraoka. All rights reserved. Copyright
statement. |
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