Masami Teraoka at Pamela Auchincloss - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Art in America, July, 1994 by Richard Vine

For over 20 years now, Japanese-born Masami Teraoka has practiced an art of cultural, formal and emotional synthesis. Around 1971, eleven years after emigrating to the U.S., he began showing erotic paintings and drawings reminiscent of Edo-period ukiyo-e woodblock prints and shunga pornography. These serio-comic works occasionally incorporated Wesselmann-inspired gaijin babes into scenes traditionally built around geishas, much as the pictures which won Teraoka wide public notice during his 1979 Whitney exhibition featured hyper-Western artifacts intruding into conventional Japanese settings - a strategy signaled by such series titles as "McDonald's Hamburgers Invading Japan."

This once relatively playful concern with cross-cultural intercourse tended to take a darker cast after 1986, when Teraoka learned that a friend's child had received HIV-contaminated blood in a transfusion. Lately, dread of pollution and consequent transformation, long a theme in Japan (whether manifested in xenophobia, sci-fi monster fantasies or high-art hermeticism), has become ubiquitous, and polymorphous, in Teraoka's hybrid work.

In the 1994 "Confessional" series of life-size watercolors which dominated this show, men are caught in the process of becoming women, and vice-versa, rendering several figures virtual hermaphrodites who sport ample breasts and black lingerie, offset by massive, fully charged penises. Bears, serpents or vampire bats, emblematic of various evils, attack these distressed transsexuals. Elsewhere, interpersonal violation runs rampant, as in Woman with Haunting Mushroom, where a Lorena Bobbitt clone in manly black briefs clutches a severed penis near her face, or Woman and Priest in which a cleric (with cassock and nimbus) sexually assaults a black-hosed female penitent. In Woman and the Artist, Teraoka portrays himself as a long-haired, bespectacled "man" with a mons veneris where his male member ought to be, grappling with a spikeheeled "woman" who turns out to be endowed with a rosy-pink cock. This is contemporary gender-role confusion at its most graphic, and Teraoka only ups the ante by supplying the image with calligraphic fig-leaf-like patches that can be slipped into strategic place for the prudish.

In Eve with Eggplants, a haloed female nude, streaked with blood from multiple small wounds, has slipped a giant condom on one of the eponymous vegetables she clutches, while bullets hang in the air and crumpled tissues, long associated in Japanese iconography with coitus, rain about her. A giant snake twists along the entire length of her body. Knowing that Japanese importation laws equate pubic hair with obscenity, the artist shipped a depilated version of this work off to Japan to be mounted on a traditional scroll mat. When the piece returned, he painted in the pubic hair before its first public showing. if the fate of East and West is global merger, Teraoka seems to imply, no effort must be spared to get past imposed legal, ethnic and sexual differences - and the mutual dread they induce - to the vulnerable, often anguished, humanity we innately share.