To celebrate the artist’s 90th birthday, established San Francisco dealer Catherine Clark—who also marks 35 years of operation this year—is staging an extensive exhibition of Japan-born, U.S.-based artist Masami Teraoka. Spanning five decades of the artist’s oeuvre, the show highlights his ability to adapt traditional Japanese illustration—particularly Edo-period woodblock conventions such as flattened space, calligraphic line and theatrical gesture—to address Western consumer culture, eroticism and the collision between East and West. Blending the surreal and the humorous with sharp social commentary, Teraoka’s work offers an unusually visceral, at times intimate yet deeply resonant reflection on how ideas of sexuality, gender, the body, love and affection have evolved alongside the accelerated societal shifts of recent decades. While his work in the 1970s often embraced a more optimistic vision of free love, it took a darker and more urgent turn in the late 1980s and 1990s, with searing responses to the AIDS crisis, religious hypocrisy and moral panic.
This survey tracks that evolution, offering a rare opportunity to see watercolors, drawings and multiples from Teraoka’s AIDS Series and Waves Series in conversation with projects ranging from 1974 to the present, including his later shift toward large-scale, theatrically staged works that grapple with globalization, environmental disaster and the fragility of belief systems. Together, they form a relentless critical effort to read, decode and mythologically reimagine the demons of our time. The exhibition also follows a spotlight on the artist presented by the gallery at Art Basel Miami Beach and inaugurates a year of programming celebrating Catherine Clark Gallery’s 35th anniversary and BOXBLUR’s 10th anniversary.