Tatooed Woman at Sunset Beach II, Tapestry edition 0f 8
MAGNOLIA
EDITIONS
Press Release
©2013 Magnolia Editions. All rights reserved. Text by Nick Stone. Excerpt from Masami-za © 2006 Alison Bing.
2527 Magnolia Street, Oakland, California 94607 Phone:510 834-2527 Fax:510.893-8334 www.magnoliaeditions.com
Masami Teraoka: Tattooed Woman at Sunset Beach II, 2013
Jacquard tapestry, 115 x 76 in. Edition of 8
Magnolia Editions is
pleased to announce its
second tapestry edition by Masami
Teraoka, a Japanese-born,
Hawaii-based artist whose work
employs a mastery of traditional
Ukiyo-e styles and iconography
to consider contemporary
issues, creating what the artist
calls a “cross-epoch conversation.”
Tattooed Woman on Sunset
Beach II finds the artist revisiting
Tattooed Woman on Sunset
Beach, an intimate 1984 watercolor
measuring only fourteen
by ten inches. Over the course
of two years, Teraoka worked
with Donald Farnsworth to
create a digital weave file based
on the painting, carefully
reworking his composition and
introducing new elements to
arrive at a monumental tapestry
edition nearly ten feet high and
six feet across.
The decorated subject of Teraoka’s Tattooed Woman is a pearl diver, one of several iconic heroines who have repeatedly appeared in the painter’s work since the 1970s. In a 2006 essay, Alison Bing explains the historical significance of this
self-sufficient and fearless female protagonist:
[The pearl diver was] the archetypal liberated woman of the Edo period who became the focus of many seafaring tales and urban myths. According to these accounts, women pearl divers
were more than the equal of their earthbound male peers: they performed impressive feats of physical prowess, earned their own
livings, and sidestepped social conventions. Not only did pearl divers eschew the heavy kimonos and elaborate hairdos women of the day were expected to wear, but these women performed their profession scandalously scantily clad. Since abalone, oysters,
and the pearls they contain were also useful symbols for female genitalia during periods of official censorship, pearl divers became a kind of shorthand for sexual liberation. [...] In her many manifestations, [Teraoka’s pearl diver] inspires vivid fantasies about what it would be like to be so utterly free of convention, clothing, and constraint.
Our heroine’s free-spirited, independent nature is underscored by her extraordinary, full-body dragon tattoos; Teraoka has noted that in the
1970s, tattooing in Japan was “still considered a lower-class macho symbol, traditionally practiced among yakuza (gangsters) and construction workers” – though by 1984, he says, “no one seemed to think twice about tattoos in America and perhaps in Japan as well.” In spite of her delicate beauty, the Tattooed Woman is covered with dragons, a symbol long associated in the East with powerful bodies of water and a popular tattoo motif among Japanese yakuza, further emphasizing her tough, outsider status. Teraoka explains that the red granules between her legs are a kind of fish food sold at Hanauma Bay, a popular snorkeling destination in Hawaii. The artist often refers to his work as “narrative art theater,” combining the highly theatrical gestures and symbolism of traditional Ukiyo-e prints with a contemporary film director’s canny sense of staging and spectacle. Many of his works can be seen as a single still or frame from an imaginary movie – or in the case of the Tattooed Woman tapestry, he suggests, perhaps an episode of the most fascinating reality show you’ve (never) seen, set at Hanauma Bay. Teraoka’s ‘pitch’ for
this show is hard to resist: Just seeing a young Japanese woman covered head-to-toe in traditional dragon tattoos at Hanauma Bay would be an astonishing
sight... but what if there were a Giant Abalone Miss Hawaii
Contest, sponsored by a Japanese magazine publisher and an
abalone producer from the Big Island? It could be a reality show:
a dozen traditionally tattooed women from Japan would ascend
the stage in high heels. The newly inaugurated Pope Francis
could fly in from the Vatican in Rome to judge the contest, and
administer kisses to the feet of each contestant in deference to the
painful high heels; the tough but sweet-looking Japanese women
would surely melt from Pope Francis’s kisses. An NHK producer
from Tokyo, the directors of the Mori Art Museum and the Honolulu
Museum of Art, and other international museum heads
could all serve as guest judges, while music could be provided by
geisha playing traditional Japanese drums and shamisen.
Writing in 1979, Howard Link notes that “Teraoka blends a
degree of wisdom with much absurdity in a consciously chosen
art style that lends itself to keen wit, nuances of hidden
meaning (often erotic and salacious), twists of earthy humor
and a great deal of sheer beauty.” The Tattooed Woman at
Sunset Beach II tapestry edition brings the exceptional creativity,
prescient social insight, and technical mastery of this
artist to bear in an extremely difficult medium, setting a new
standard for Jacquard weaving’s potential to depict even the
visions of an imagination as extraordinary as Teraoka’s.
EDITIONS
Press Release
©2013 Magnolia Editions. All rights reserved. Text by Nick Stone. Excerpt from Masami-za © 2006 Alison Bing.
2527 Magnolia Street, Oakland, California 94607 Phone:510 834-2527 Fax:510.893-8334 www.magnoliaeditions.com
Masami Teraoka: Tattooed Woman at Sunset Beach II, 2013
Jacquard tapestry, 115 x 76 in. Edition of 8
Magnolia Editions is
pleased to announce its
second tapestry edition by Masami
Teraoka, a Japanese-born,
Hawaii-based artist whose work
employs a mastery of traditional
Ukiyo-e styles and iconography
to consider contemporary
issues, creating what the artist
calls a “cross-epoch conversation.”
Tattooed Woman on Sunset
Beach II finds the artist revisiting
Tattooed Woman on Sunset
Beach, an intimate 1984 watercolor
measuring only fourteen
by ten inches. Over the course
of two years, Teraoka worked
with Donald Farnsworth to
create a digital weave file based
on the painting, carefully
reworking his composition and
introducing new elements to
arrive at a monumental tapestry
edition nearly ten feet high and
six feet across.
The decorated subject of Teraoka’s Tattooed Woman is a pearl diver, one of several iconic heroines who have repeatedly appeared in the painter’s work since the 1970s. In a 2006 essay, Alison Bing explains the historical significance of this
self-sufficient and fearless female protagonist:
[The pearl diver was] the archetypal liberated woman of the Edo period who became the focus of many seafaring tales and urban myths. According to these accounts, women pearl divers
were more than the equal of their earthbound male peers: they performed impressive feats of physical prowess, earned their own
livings, and sidestepped social conventions. Not only did pearl divers eschew the heavy kimonos and elaborate hairdos women of the day were expected to wear, but these women performed their profession scandalously scantily clad. Since abalone, oysters,
and the pearls they contain were also useful symbols for female genitalia during periods of official censorship, pearl divers became a kind of shorthand for sexual liberation. [...] In her many manifestations, [Teraoka’s pearl diver] inspires vivid fantasies about what it would be like to be so utterly free of convention, clothing, and constraint.
Our heroine’s free-spirited, independent nature is underscored by her extraordinary, full-body dragon tattoos; Teraoka has noted that in the
1970s, tattooing in Japan was “still considered a lower-class macho symbol, traditionally practiced among yakuza (gangsters) and construction workers” – though by 1984, he says, “no one seemed to think twice about tattoos in America and perhaps in Japan as well.” In spite of her delicate beauty, the Tattooed Woman is covered with dragons, a symbol long associated in the East with powerful bodies of water and a popular tattoo motif among Japanese yakuza, further emphasizing her tough, outsider status. Teraoka explains that the red granules between her legs are a kind of fish food sold at Hanauma Bay, a popular snorkeling destination in Hawaii. The artist often refers to his work as “narrative art theater,” combining the highly theatrical gestures and symbolism of traditional Ukiyo-e prints with a contemporary film director’s canny sense of staging and spectacle. Many of his works can be seen as a single still or frame from an imaginary movie – or in the case of the Tattooed Woman tapestry, he suggests, perhaps an episode of the most fascinating reality show you’ve (never) seen, set at Hanauma Bay. Teraoka’s ‘pitch’ for
this show is hard to resist: Just seeing a young Japanese woman covered head-to-toe in traditional dragon tattoos at Hanauma Bay would be an astonishing
sight... but what if there were a Giant Abalone Miss Hawaii
Contest, sponsored by a Japanese magazine publisher and an
abalone producer from the Big Island? It could be a reality show:
a dozen traditionally tattooed women from Japan would ascend
the stage in high heels. The newly inaugurated Pope Francis
could fly in from the Vatican in Rome to judge the contest, and
administer kisses to the feet of each contestant in deference to the
painful high heels; the tough but sweet-looking Japanese women
would surely melt from Pope Francis’s kisses. An NHK producer
from Tokyo, the directors of the Mori Art Museum and the Honolulu
Museum of Art, and other international museum heads
could all serve as guest judges, while music could be provided by
geisha playing traditional Japanese drums and shamisen.
Writing in 1979, Howard Link notes that “Teraoka blends a
degree of wisdom with much absurdity in a consciously chosen
art style that lends itself to keen wit, nuances of hidden
meaning (often erotic and salacious), twists of earthy humor
and a great deal of sheer beauty.” The Tattooed Woman at
Sunset Beach II tapestry edition brings the exceptional creativity,
prescient social insight, and technical mastery of this
artist to bear in an extremely difficult medium, setting a new
standard for Jacquard weaving’s potential to depict even the
visions of an imagination as extraordinary as Teraoka’s.
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