Masami Teraoka takes the visual language of Edo-period Japan and turns it on the present. For five decades he has set reality against the surreal, humor against social commentary, and the historical against the contemporary, and he has consistently gone after the subjects most people would rather leave alone.

Born in Onomichi, Hiroshima, in 1936, Teraoka took a degree in aesthetics from Kwansei Gakuin University in 1959 before continuing his training in Los Angeles, where he earned a BA in 1964 and an MA in 1968 from Otis College of Art and Design.

The watercolors of the 1970s and early 1980s set the terms. Series including "McDonald's Hamburgers Invading Japan," "New Views of Mt. Fuji," and "31 Flavors Invading Japan" staged the meeting of East and West as comedy with a blade in it, using ukiyo-e composition to register what economic and cultural globalization was doing on the ground.

Sexuality runs through all of it, but the register changes. The free love of the 1970s and early 1980s gives way by the mid-1980s to alarm at the spread of HIV, and later to outrage at sexual abuse inside institutions, the anger that movements like #metoo would eventually make public. The medium shifted with the subject. During the "AIDS Series" Teraoka moved watercolor from paper to unstretched canvas, working at a scale equal to what the epidemic was doing to communities.

From the 1990s the work turned to oil and to long narrative paintings that indict the Church and other institutions that shelter predators. Recent paintings extend the charge to patriarchy, to hypocrisy in American politics, and to social and political repression in Russia under Vladimir Putin. These are usually oil on panel, built on the model of gilded Renaissance triptychs, so that the storytelling instinct of the early ukiyo-e work survives intact but arrives in a Western idiom with the baroque flourish of European ecclesiastical painting. In 2017 Teraoka adapted Shakespeare's The Tempest with Viktoria Naraxsa of the Russian activist collective Pussy Riot, premiering in Hawaiʻi. Naraxsa has since appeared as a protagonist in his paintings, sharing the frame with Pope Francis, Vladimir Putin, and the geisha Momotaro.

Teraoka lives and works on Oʻahu, Hawaiʻi. He is represented by Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco.