Masami Teraoka (born 1936) is a contemporary artist known for his watercolor paintings which mimic use of the traditional Japanese woodblock prints. His pieces blend reality with fantasy, humor with commentary, history with the present.

Masami was born in 1936 in the town of Onomichi, between Hiroshima and Osaka, Japan. He studied art from 1954-59 at the Kwansei Gakuin University in Kobe, Japan where he received his B.A. in Aesthetics, and from 1964-68 at the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles where he received a B.A. and M.F.A.

His early work consisted primarily of watercolor paintings 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. McDonald's Hamburgers Invading Japan and 31 Flavors Invading Japan characterize this time period.

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Volume 21, number 2: Emerging Themes, Emerging Voices
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Volume 21, number 2: Copley's Cargo
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In 1765, John Singleton Copley sent his painting Henry Pelham (Boy with a Squirrel) from Boston to London in hopes of receiving feedback from the arbiters of academic aesthetics. Several months later, he received the welcome news that Sir Joshua Reynolds had called the painting "wonderfull." In virtually every scholarly narrative of early American art, Boy with a Squirrel derives its canonical significance from this famous transatlantic relay. But the most basic reality of that relay–the massive fact of the Atlantic Ocean standing between Copley and his interlocutors–has barely been registered in the scholarship.This essay interprets Boy with a Squirrel in terms of the difficulty and delicacy of its transatlantic transmission. I argue that Copley, as he attempted to create a painting that would have the necessary transitive qualities, drew from an array of familiar discourses of Atlantic exchange and transport. The painting's profile format evoked strategies of numismatic exchange. The precise representation of the flying squirrel tapped into well-established transatlantic natural history circuits. The spatial transformations of the composition echoed not only empiricist theories of sensory conveyance (especially the writings of George Berkeley), but also mirrored the workaday dynamics of the shipping and reassembly of transatlantic commodities. Copley, like many other colonial artists, worked in a global community governed by distance, difference, and delay. By attending to the vehicular context of Boy with a Squirrel, we can begin to understand his strategies for articulating–and navigating–that new global space.

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