Saru Gallery
       Japanese Prints & Japanese Paintings

Biography Teraoka, Masami (1936 - )

Teraoka Masami was born in Onomichi, in Hiroshima prefecture. After studying and graduating in Japan he moved to US in 1961, where he continued his career and studied at the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles.
His early work consists primarily of watercolour paintings and prints that mimicked the flat 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, humour with commentary, history with the present.
In the 1980s, Teraoka shifted his palette and the scale of his works and started depicting AIDS as a subject. Since the late 1990s, he has been producing large-scale narrative paintings addressing social and political issues, especially abuse in the Catholic Church. These large-scale paintings are inspired by well-known Renaissance paintings, rather than by Japanese woodblock prints.
His work has been exhibited extensively in numerous solo exhibitions, and is included in more than 50 museums.