Masami Teraoka
Painted AIDS, tourism and consumerism as ukiyo-e woodblock prints, then as vast Renaissance altarpieces.
Masami Teraoka was born in Onomichi, Japan in 1936 and moved to Los Angeles in 1961. His best-known work adopts the exact visual language of Edo-period ukiyo-e — the format, the calligraphic cartouches, the flattened space, the woodblock line — and fills it with subjects the genre never had: hamburgers, condoms, tourists, the AIDS crisis, and the collision of Japanese and American consumer life. From the 1990s the scale changed completely, into enormous triptych paintings in the manner of Renaissance altarpieces addressing clerical abuse and religious politics. He has lived in Hawaii for decades.
The watercolours in the ukiyo-e manner are the most recognised body of work and are the market's core; they are large, on paper, in water-based media, and are acutely light-sensitive, so fading and framing history bear directly on value. The late altarpiece paintings are architectural in scale and are largely institutional. There is a print output in woodblock and lithograph. American and Japanese institutional collections hold much of the important work, and provenance is generally well documented through his galleries.
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