Pictures from an Inquisition - Masami Teraoka's paintings of Clinton impeachment hearings

Art in America, April, 2001 by Eleanor Heartney

Shifting from his earlier subversions of Japanese pictorial tradition, Masami Teraoka now draw on the conventions of late medieval European art for teeming, large-scale paintings about topical events such as the impeachment of Bill Clinton.

It was in the early 1980s that Japanese-born Masami Teraoka first gained recognition for watercolors in which the realm of ukiyo-e prints clashed with images of the Westernized present. In these playful works, figures that might have stepped out of a woodblock print by 19th-century Japanese master Kunisada can be seen chomping down on McDonald's burgers, wielding video cameras and golf bags or carefully unwrapping packages of condoms. Initially, Teraoka came across as a gentle social critic who used the dissonance between style and content to underscore the absurdities and pitfalls of contemporary life.

As the 1980s progressed, however, Teraoka's subject matter began to darken. Drawing on the tradition of Kabuki-inspired ghost prints, he repeatedly addressed the AIDS crisis, evoking the terrors of the disease with images of giant snakes and sinister toads. Even more strikingly, since 1992 Teraoka has largely eschewed Japanese references for nightmarish, European-tinged visions. Enormous mural-scale paintings plunge us into teeming infernos in which scantily clad women are assaulted by microphones, trussed and imprisoned in display cases and closely examined by tight-lipped clerics. Other figures wear carnivalesque masks with sword-like beaks, marking them as birds of prey. Symbols of death and damnation abound: skeletons peer from corners, garlands of skulls adorn captive maidens, red gashes of blood and flame lick over the painting surface.

Although one can glimpse something of the "hell scrolls" of the Kamakura era in these works, they are much more beholden to Dante, Bosch and the conventions of late medieval Western art. Winged putti hover over gold backgrounds (somewhat tarnished, as if to signify the debasement of the whole proceeding), a single composition can include different episodes from an unfolding narrative, and the size of the figures in the paintings often corresponds to their thematic importance rather than to how close or far they are from the foreground. Colors also tend toward the symbolic, with the female figures rendered milky white and tipped with light, while the inquisitors are dressed in black or dark red robes.

But despite all this medievalism, it's clear that Teraoka continues to have contemporary events at the front of his mind. He deploys motifs of recent vintage such as an AIDS ribbon doubling as a Greek Cross, a porn-filled computer screen capturing an inquisitor's attention and, figuring prominently in several recent paintings, a stained blue dress similar to the one worn by Monica Lewinsky during one of her White House trysts. In series like "Virtual Inquisition," "Adam and Eve" and "Confessional," Teraoka seeks metaphors for the peculiar mix of prurience and puritanism that marks contemporary American culture while continuing to pursue his earlier themes of dehumanization and loss of privacy. In these recent works, the tools of the information age--from the computer keyboard and mouse to the TV journalist's microphone--become instruments of medieval torture for those caught up in the media circus.

Some followers of Teraoka's work have wondered why an artist so closely identified with clever parodies of traditional Japanese styles would turn to a Western medieval format. In fact, Teraoka, who has lived in the United States since 1961, has had a long acquaintance with the religious art of the West. This began with a two-year course in Christianity while he was a student at Kwansei Gakuin University in Japan and has been reinforced by various trips to Europe, most recently last spring to attend the Holy Week celebration in Seville. (Hooded figures from this ritual appear in the recent paintings). Moreover, as Teraoka himself points out, whether his sources have been Asian or European, he has always used familiar historical traditions to bring contemporary issues into focus.

The ukiyo-e tradition was well-suited to his lighthearted satires from the 1970s and early '80s on pollution and the materialism of fastfood culture, and even to the subsequent AIDS-related images, which still privileged sexual desire even as they highlighted its potentially horrific consequences. Historically, ukiyo-e were commercially produced woodblock prints that celebrated the "floating world," the sector of Japanese society that encompassed brothels, geishas, Kabuki theater and sumo wrestling. But in Teraoka's new works, where the floating world of pleasure-seekers has been replaced by the Spanish Inquisition, sex is no longer about pleasure. Rather, it has become the theater in which political powerplays are enacted before a voyeuristic populace seeking titillation from the sexual misdeeds of the mighty, and where religion and morality can become weapons against freedom. A recurring theme in these paintings is how the religious and political right in America has wrested control of the definition of morality in order to further its own purposes. In keeping with the new subject matter, Teraoka has also shifted his style away from the graphic linearity of the ukiyo-e print toward a more painterly, Western style replete with chiaroscuro and modeled forms. Painting directly on canvas or linen for the most part, Teraoka now generally works in oils rather than the watercolor medium he favored previously.