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Masami Teraoka
"McDonald's Hamburgers Invading Japan/Self-Portrait", Watercolor, Figurative

1974

About the Item

"McDonald's Hamburgers Invading Japan" is a delightfully inventive comic self-portrait by the creative genius Masami Teraoka. He has presented himself dressed in the traditional kimono robe and the artwork is in the famous Ukiyo-e style. Ukiyo-e is a genre of Japanese art which flourished from the 17th through 19th centuries. Its artists produced woodblock prints and paintings of such subjects as female beauties; kabuki actors and sumo wrestlers; scenes from history and folk tales; travel scenes and landscapes; flora and fauna; and erotica and sometimes humorous characters. The term ukiyo-e (浮世絵) translates as "picture[s] of the floating world". This delightful watercolor self-portrait, comments on the problematic relationship between the United States and Japan and the Americanization of his country in the work, utilizing subtle pun humor that is the hallmark of Japanese culture. As Teraoka explains, "the character 'maku; means spread, 'donald; means screaming, 'do' and 'han' mean often, and 'Han' also means obnoxious or annoying. 'Burger' sounds like 'Baka' which means stupidity." This work was originally purchased by filmmaker Eric Saarinen, son of St. Louis Archway architect Eero Saarinen and grandson of Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen, during his time of close friendship with Masami Teraoka. During its time in his possession it was lent to and exhibited in the Oakland Museum and the Space Gallery in Santa Monica, California. He was born in the town of Onomichi in Hiroshima Prefecture. He studied from 1954–59 at the Kwansei Gakuin University in Kobe, Japan where he received his B.A. in Aesthetics. He moved to the United States in 1961. From 1964 to 1968 he attended and graduated from the Otis Art Institute, now the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, where he received a B.F.A. and M.F.A. He received an honorary doctorate in the fine arts in 2016 from the Otis College of Art and Design. Teraoka's early work consisted primarily of watercolor paintings and prints that mimicked the flat, bold 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, humor with commentary, history with the present. In the 1980s, Teraoka shifted palette and scale to depict AIDS as a subject, transforming his ukiyo-e derived paintings into a darker realm. Since the late 1990s, he has been producing large-scale narrative paintings inspired by well-known Renaissance paintings, rather than by Japanese woodblock prints. These paintings reference modern day social and political issues, such as the September 11 attacks and abuse in the Catholic Church. The Cloisters / Tsunami in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art, depicts Towers of Babel as the twin towers of the World Trade Center and fallen priests. This painting also includes a self-portrait in the left upper corner. Teraoka has been the subject of more than 70 solo exhibitions, many of which have traveled extensively, including those organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1980; The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu (now known as the Honolulu Museum of Art Spalding House) in 1988; and the Yale University Art Gallery in 1998. In 1996, he was featured in a solo exhibition at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution and in 1997 at the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco. His work is in more than 50 public collections worldwide, including the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA; the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D. C.; the Honolulu Museum of Art, Hawaii; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the National Portrait Gallery, Washington D. C.; Tate Modern, London, England; the Queensland Art Gallery/GOMA, Brisbane, Australia; the Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow, Scotland; and the Singapore Art Museum, Singapore. Masami Teraoka has twice been honored by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York and received two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. Without the frame the piece measures 14.50 h x 21.50 w. Provenance is on Verso.
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