Arts & Culture on the Pacific Rim : A SPECIAL REPORT : Teraoka’s Exhibition Takes On AIDS

A pale-skinned geisha soaking in a wooden bathtub rips open a condom package, her thin red lips curled into a grimace, her tiny teeth tearing at the blue plastic.

Her elaborate coiffure is held tight by thick hairpins and one imagines a silk kimono hanging nearby.

Like an Edo-period woodblock print made on Melrose Avenue, the style of Masami Teraoka’s “AIDS Series/Geisha in Bath” may be traditional Japanese, but the content is unmistakably ‘80s. Background text, written in Japanese behind the bather, spells out her most modern monologue.

“I cannot open this at all,” the geisha is to have said. “ . . . I don’t have scissors. . . . Oh, this smells really odd, it has to be the spermicide; it’s also slimy.”

The 9-foot-high watercolor, featured in an exhibit opening today at the Long Beach Museum of Art, is quintessential Teraoka, a Japanese-born artist who has spent more than half his 53 years here. He recently moved from Los Angeles to Oahu.

Well known for watercolors rendered in wood-block print style that are populated with Kabuki-like characters and satirize contemporary social issues, Teraoka first addressed AIDS in 1986. However, the 14 works in the AIDS Series at the Long Beach exhibit, “Masami Teraoka: Waves and Plagues,” have never been seen in Los Angeles.

The artist created the series to communicate that AIDS, still rare in Japan, “may be slipping through the whole network of protection” there, particularly through Westerners’ contact with geishas, he said by phone recently.

“My intent is to bring out the issue so that people can look at it,” explained Teraoka, a critic of the Westernization of Japan who has portrayed Pacific invasions by McDonald’s hamburgers and 31 Flavors ice cream.

But, characteristically, the artist rejects a heavy-handed approach, using a “wonderful visual experience” as a “buffer” for serious subject matter. (His wittier depictions have included snorkeling geishas and Kabuki joggers.)

“If people get too involved in a realistic format, they would rather turn their back and not want to see the issue.”

Teraoka’s combination of ancient East and contemporary West “represents the way I live and think. I cannot really totally get rid of my background as a Japanese-born American citizen.”

The juxtaposition also underlines the tremendous chasm between the two cultures and “makes contemporary American life seem more contemporary,” he said.

“Japan and America are so opposite, in every direction. When I compare Japan with European countries, there are quite a number of similarities. Europeans have long traditions and seem to have a lot of feeling for a caste system and for family and ancestors. Also, Japanese and European people have a more reserved attitude than Americans. So after all my travels in Europe and life in America, I find the most strikingly different countries are Japan and America.”

“Waves and Plagues,” running through April 23, was organized by the new Contemporary Museum in Honolulu. It comprises 33 works, including eight landscapes and several multipanel screens.