Ray Yoshida, whose mysteriously comical, semi-abstract paintings and collages and four decades of teaching at the Art Institute of Chicago influenced generations of prominent artists, died Jan. 10 in Kauai, Hawaii. He was 78 and had moved to Hawaii from Chicago three years ago.

The cause was cancer, said Adam Baumgold, his dealer in New York.

Yoshida was among the most admired contributors to a tradition known as Chicago Imagism. Unlike the art world of New York, where prestige in the later 20th century was accorded mainly to abstraction, conceptualism and cool forms of Pop Art, the Chicago art world favored surrealism, fantasy and oddball humor.

Yoshida’s first mature work was a series of collages consisting of small images and image fragments clipped from comic books arranged in neat, gridded order on sheets of paper. They look as though they were produced by a methodical, possibly deranged researcher for some obscure scholarly or scientific purpose.

In the 1970s, Yoshida switched to painting, but he returned to the comic image collages in the early ’90s. They were featured in his last solo exhibition, in 1999 at Adam Baumgold Gallery.

“He was very important to a lot of people (at the Art Institute of Chicago),” said Robert Storr, the dean of the Yale University School of Art and a former student of Yoshida. “As a teacher, he was mysterious and witty. The mystery would draw you in, and then he would say something funny but with an edge that would make you think — kind of like his paintings.”