(upbeat piano music)
- [Steven] We're in the photography studio
in the de Young Museum, part of
the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
Looking at a Japanese screen, but this screen
is from the late 20th century.
- [Emma] By a Japanese-American artist named Masami Teraoka.
- [Steven] And what this screen does so well
is to mix both Japanese and American cultural traditions.
- [Emma] Here, Teraoka is addressing
this burning topic of his day,
the AIDS pandemic that in 1986 was at its height.
- [Steven] It's hard for us to remember
just how terrifying this moment was.
By the time we get to 1986,
10s of thousands of people had died,
and there was almost no political will
in Washington to confront and address this pandemic.
- [Emma] Masami Teraoka was inspired to create this work
by the story of a friend, who confided in him that
her infant had contracted AIDS through a blood transfusion.
And so this became the springboard
for Teraoka to universalize and humanize
this, at the time, highly politicized crisis.
And he talked about wanting to confront the universality
of this issue, to show that it was a global health crisis
that affected people from all walks of life.
So he takes this highly personal, individual tragedy
and opens it out onto these much
larger social and political issues.
- [Steven] And he brings to bear a full arsenal
of Japanese art history to tell this story.
- [Emma] It's this very traditional,
four-panel folding screen format.
It draws on the tradition of woodblock prints,
ukiyo-e, from Edo period Japan.
The title American Kabuki, Kabuki refers to a traditional
theatrical form that was widely accessible and popular.
Kabuki incorporated both overt erotic content
and sometimes very covert political content.
- [Steven] And that's because
Kabuki theater was highly censored.
Representing contemporary events had been outlawed,
and so people used historical events
to refer to contemporary corruption
and other stories that needed to be told.
But any sense of sensuality has been overwhelmed by
this sense of tragedy, of frantic terror
that we see in the woman's face.
She clutches her child, you can just make out
the back of the child's head, and her wild despair.
- [Emma] Look at her wind-blown hair, her hollow-eyed stare.
These nebulous forms that represent
the spirits of deceased AIDS victims
mirror the forms of her hair.
She rises up out of this surging wave.
- [Steven] The crest of the waves are almost like
fingers that want to pull her down.
- [Emma] You can almost see the waves
as skeletal fingers of death.
And the artist actually referred
to them as creeping fingers.
And we think of artistic precedence and inspirations,
Hokusai's The Great Wave, which shows
this tiny boat that's about to capsize.
And here the wave represents this tidal force,
this tsunami of destructive energy
that the AIDS epidemic was reeking on the world stage.
Look at her blackened teeth.
This was a convention for showing that
a woman was married in the Edo period.
But here it takes on darker associations
when combined with the lesions that we see on her forearm,
and her forehead, and her cheek, which show that
she's already suffering from the symptoms of AIDS.
- [Steven] In Kabuki theater, that green-blue eyeshadow
is a representation of the ghostly, of fear.
And so he's drawing on these symbols that are 200 years old.
And even the calligraphy is based on
a historical calligraphy that was used in
advertisements for Kabuki plays.
We have the large narrative that unfolds before us,
but we have it also in microcosm, in the lower right corner,
where we see a frigate bird who seems like
he's about to attack two mating fish just below.
And here this black bird seems so menacing.
- [Emma] And frigate birds are known for
stealing fish from the mouths of other birds.
You could say in a sense that this bird represents
this stealing or the extinction of life.
And there's this tension between the cycles of life
and fertility, represented by the fish,
and then this menacing, predatory bird.
I think this is mirrored in the conflict between
this very luminous full moon, which
the artist said for him was a symbol of hope
and of the cycles of life and rebirth,
but it's overshadowed by these menacing
black storm clouds that dominate the horizon.
- [Steven] And I'm taken with the calligraphic,
almost signature-like lines that
define the folds of her kimono.
Throughout this image we have this
confrontation between beauty and tragedy.
- [Emma] You almost have the sense
that you're watching a blockbuster movie,
with the central drama unfolding before your eyes.
The inscription paints a beautiful picture of the scene.
In the evening, the clouds are
very turbulent, storm-bearing.
The sound of the waves is loud and black clouds
are beginning to spread over the shoreline.
As the evening wears on, the full moon
is revealed by the parting of the clouds.
Suddenly a cry is heard, "Help us!"
"Help us!"
It is so faint that the audience
is uncertain whether they heard a voice,
or if it is only the sound of the waves.
(upbeat piano music)