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Lot Essay
Love is a great gift. It makes people sensitive and generous toward others. People are elated when they feel loved. It helps them learn more about life, not to mention creating life. Love and sexuality are vital parts of the human nature and spirit, gifts that we should treasure.
---Masami Teraoka
In the late 1990s, Masami Teraoka shifted his creative source material from Japan to the United States and Europe. By then, the time he spent in the United States was far longer than in Japan, prompting him to switch his inspiration from ukiyo-e-derived paintings to European Renaissance-based aesthetics. The complexity, breadth and depth of Teraoka's social concerns influenced his decision to make oil paintings, often with gold leaf and evocative of religious paintings from the cinquecento. Instead of using watercolours to portray Teraoka's East meets West experience as he had done for the first two decades of his career, here Teraoka renders his subject matter in oil paint on canvas, in a Renaissance-influenced style, depicting hybrid religious, mythological and socio-political imagery.
Teraoka has long been concerned with one particular matter: preventing the fears confronting contemporary society from festering and spreading into a permanent, global epidemics, or conflicts that disrupt interpersonal relationships.
In The Cloisters/Birth of Venus (Lot 459), Teraoka references an iconic painting—Sandro Botticelli's Birth of Venus: 'love' is the antidote to every fear (Fig. 27). The artist has forthrightly stated that life would become insipid and unpleasant without sex, and that 'sex' and 'love' are interconnected. The artist places himself and his thenwife, Lynda Hess, in the composition. His legs float above the ground as his wife grasps his body, in an attempt to stave off the prying hands and judgment of the clergy and lawmen. The goddess Venus bestows grace to the couple, despite the harassment of a lecherous black-suited dressed man, red cassocked cardinal, and leering clergyman. Further she selflessly offers her milk to the beleaguered husband-and-wife, helping them from impending doom.
The tight embrace between the couple is noteworthy in that it has concealed their physical forms, thus obscuring their gender and leaving us momentarily disoriented. Viewers can only rely on the sanitary napkin and tampon to take their cues. In this way, the artist attempts to unveil a new perspective on gender, in which the binary is rapidly becoming less rigid. The couple in the painting turn their wary but direct gazes directly toward those harbouring ill intent against them, metaphorically suggesting that no one should stay apathetic or turn a blind eye to the tragedy and totalitarian oppression in the world. Out of 'love,' we raise our voice and take a stand against injustices in the world. Herein lies the solution to humanities problems.
Teraoka noted, "I have wondered if I should make such allusions in this painting; but I did, because I refuse to be disinterested in things around me and the world."
---Masami Teraoka
In the late 1990s, Masami Teraoka shifted his creative source material from Japan to the United States and Europe. By then, the time he spent in the United States was far longer than in Japan, prompting him to switch his inspiration from ukiyo-e-derived paintings to European Renaissance-based aesthetics. The complexity, breadth and depth of Teraoka's social concerns influenced his decision to make oil paintings, often with gold leaf and evocative of religious paintings from the cinquecento. Instead of using watercolours to portray Teraoka's East meets West experience as he had done for the first two decades of his career, here Teraoka renders his subject matter in oil paint on canvas, in a Renaissance-influenced style, depicting hybrid religious, mythological and socio-political imagery.
Teraoka has long been concerned with one particular matter: preventing the fears confronting contemporary society from festering and spreading into a permanent, global epidemics, or conflicts that disrupt interpersonal relationships.
In The Cloisters/Birth of Venus (Lot 459), Teraoka references an iconic painting—Sandro Botticelli's Birth of Venus: 'love' is the antidote to every fear (Fig. 27). The artist has forthrightly stated that life would become insipid and unpleasant without sex, and that 'sex' and 'love' are interconnected. The artist places himself and his thenwife, Lynda Hess, in the composition. His legs float above the ground as his wife grasps his body, in an attempt to stave off the prying hands and judgment of the clergy and lawmen. The goddess Venus bestows grace to the couple, despite the harassment of a lecherous black-suited dressed man, red cassocked cardinal, and leering clergyman. Further she selflessly offers her milk to the beleaguered husband-and-wife, helping them from impending doom.
The tight embrace between the couple is noteworthy in that it has concealed their physical forms, thus obscuring their gender and leaving us momentarily disoriented. Viewers can only rely on the sanitary napkin and tampon to take their cues. In this way, the artist attempts to unveil a new perspective on gender, in which the binary is rapidly becoming less rigid. The couple in the painting turn their wary but direct gazes directly toward those harbouring ill intent against them, metaphorically suggesting that no one should stay apathetic or turn a blind eye to the tragedy and totalitarian oppression in the world. Out of 'love,' we raise our voice and take a stand against injustices in the world. Herein lies the solution to humanities problems.
Teraoka noted, "I have wondered if I should make such allusions in this painting; but I did, because I refuse to be disinterested in things around me and the world."