Yasumasa Morimura (森村 泰昌, Morimura Yasumasa, born June 11, 1951) is a contemporary Japanese performance and appropriation artist whose work encompasses photography, film, and live performance. He is known for his reinterpretation of recognizable artworks and figures from art history, history, and mass media through his adoption of personas that transcend national, ethnic, gendered, and racial boundaries. Across his photographic and performative series, Morimura's works explore a number of interconnected themes, including: the nature of identity and its ability to undergo change, postcolonialism, authorship, and the Western view of Japan – and Asia, more broadly – as feminine.
Originally intent on channeling his creative energy into black-and-white still life photography, Morimura struggled to ascertain his identity and decided to visualize this inner struggle through self-portraiture. In 1985, Portrait (Van Gogh), marked the first of dozens of self-portraits Morimura completed in which he adopted the role of established artists, major historical figures, celebrated popular culture icons, and identifiable subjects from well-known artworks.
Since the 1980s, Morimura's artistic process entails a rigorous system in which he transforms his entire body into a nearly identical replica of his designated subject through elaborate costumes, makeup, props, and set designs. Once digital photography and computer editing software became more accessible and refined in the late-1990s, Morimura's works demonstrate greater visual complexity in his manipulation of composition, lighting, and the number of figures he portrays within a single artwork.
For the last two and a half decades, Morimura has brought his personas to life in short video, film, and live performances in which he expresses their thoughts through movement and scripted monologues.“Yasumasa Morimura: Ego Obscura, Tokyo 2020,” 2020. Hara Museum of Contemporary Art. http://www.haramuseum.or.jp/en/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/en_pr_Morimura_200608.pdf.
Early life and education (1951–1978) Yasumasa Morimura was born in Osaka, Japan in 1951 to father Nobuo (died in 2006) and mother Hiroko (died in 2016).Hasegawa, Kanae. “Yasumasa Morimura: Ego Obscura, Tokyo, 2020.” Studio International, 2020. https://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/yasumasa-morimura-ego-obscura-tokyo-2020-review-hara-museum-of-contemporary-art.
Following the end of the American Occupation of Japan in 1952, Morimura grew up in a generation that embraced Western values and cultural trends that came to define Japan's Post-World War II period. His continual exposure to Western, particularly American, socio-cultural customs in music, film, and fashion would later influence his artistic pursuits in the 1980s.Gotthardt, Alexxa. “Why Yasumasa Morimura Places Himself in Art History's Most Famous Scenes.” Artsy, October 18, 2018. https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-yasumasa-morimura-places-art-historys-famous-scenes.
In the mid-1970s, Morimura enrolled in the Kyoto City University of Art, where he received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1978. During his studies, an early interest in photography emerged after he took a course taught by Life magazine photographer Y. Ernest Satow (1927–1990). Satow lectured on the Modern Western aesthetic ideals of photography and camera techniques, particularly as it was exemplified in the works of the French Humanist photographer Henri-Cartier Bresson.
Early career (1978–1988) Following graduation, Satow hired Morimura to work as a photography assistant. Through this employment experience, Morimura produced his first artworks which were black-and-white still life images mainly shot indoors. These encompassed his Barco negro na mesa series from the early-1980s. However, he incorporated an additional layer of creativity through his photographs of sculptural assemblages he designed from found objects.“Yasumasa Morimura: Barco Negro on the Table Collotype Portfolio, 2005.” Artsy. Accessed November 9, 2021. https://www.artsy.net/artwork/yasumasa-morimura-sen-cun-tai-chang-barco-negro-on-the-table-collotype-portfolio.
One of these works, Tabletop City (Arch of Triumph) (1984), is a vertical photographic composition in which a fork occupies the center plane as it leans against a conical glass with a light bulb inside of it. Morimura's careful arrangement of found objects grew more complex as seen in a photograph he took of a tall, slender tower made from dice, cut out letters, and a painted board.
In 1985, Morimura shifted his attention to self-portraiture after he contemplated the precise nature of his Asian identity. Reflecting on the motivations behind this thematic approach, Morimura recalled the questions he raised at this moment: “Who am I? My face is Asian, but I am increasingly living in a western style? Can I say I am Japanese?”.
In tandem with these pressing questions, Morimura's understanding of Modern Japanese history was equally influential on the change in his creative focus. He has regularly cited the evolving lifestyle of the Meiji Emperor Mutsuhito in which he was raised to act feminine during the Shogunate's rule but later adopted a more militaristic image and masculine personality once he ascended to the imperial throne. Morimura noted that the Emperor's sudden change in appearance signified that this is an example of how easily one can transform their identity instantaneously through different apparel.Morimura, Yasumasa. “Why I Posed as Yukio Mishima, Or, The Relationship of 3 M’s: MacArthur, Mishima, Morimura.” Speech, n.d. https://www.keenecenter.org/download_files/MorimuraSpeech.pdf. From here, Morimura began to question if a change in clothing could truly make a person feel like someone completely different.
Morimura created his first self-portraits in which he portrayed the Impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh and his sitter Camille Roulin in 1985. These photorealistic engagements with van Gogh's paintings marked the first instance of Morimura challenging the malleability of identity formation. Subsequently, Morimura participated with fellow artists Tomoaki Ishihara and Hiroshi Kimura in a three-person group exhibition at Kyoto's Galerie 16 in 1985, Smile with Radical Will, where he first exhibited his van Gogh and Roulin self-portraits.
A watershed moment in Morimura's career occurred in 1988 when he created Portrait (Futago), a modern recreation of Édouard Manet's controversial 1863 painting Olympia. Morimura positions himself in the roles of both the reclining white Olympia figure and her black maidservant and he replaces part of the surroundings with distinctly Japanese attributes as seen in the golden crane bed linens and the maneki-neko (“beckoning cat” figure said to symbolize good luck). Morimura supplanting both the white and black female subjects with his male Asian body was significant for its subversion of a work considered a staple of the Western Art History canon. The photograph addresses the issues of the male gaze and objectification of the female body, and it simultaneously brings to light the ignorance toward nonwhite subjects in Art History. By occupying the roles of the two sole figures, Morimura renders himself unavoidable for viewers to observe.
Morimura's art attracted global attention after he was invited to exhibit his self-portraits for Japan at the 43rd Venice Biennale in their Aperto section.Sakurai, Motoatsu. “Foreword.” Essay. In Yasumasa Morimura: Ego Obscura, 7–7. New York, NY: The Japan Society, 2018. Exhibition Catalogue. The opportunity to participate in this prestigious international art fair rapidly catapulted Morimura's status to world art icon that soon led to his participation in dozens of group and solo exhibitions throughout Asia, North America, Europe, and Australia at the end of the 1980s and throughout the 1990s.
Career success and development (1988–2000)
Although the 1988 Venice Biennale was responsible for officially launching Morimura's career on an international scale, his 1990 solo exhibition Daughter of Art History at the Sagacho Exhibit Space in Tokyo led to his popularity within the Japanese art world.Friedman, Dan. “Morimura, Yasumasa.” Essay. In Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Photography, edited by Lynne Warren, 1082–84. Routledge, 2005. The exhibition's theme centered on Morimura's critique of the Art History canon in which he deconstructed Western notions of aesthetic beauty, and examined Japan's longstanding interest in Western culture. The success of Daughter of Art History was later revived in future exhibitions, most notably in 1999 at Luhring Augustine Gallery in New York.
Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky was a traveling exhibition held at the Guggenheim, Yokohama Museum of Art, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art from 1994 to 1995.Friedman, Dan. “Morimura, Yasumasa.” Essay. In Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Photography, edited by Lynne Warren, 1083. Routledge, 2005. As the first historical survey of post-1945 avant-garde Japanese art, Morimura's selection as a participant in this landmark exhibition attracted positive attention from arts & culture publications.“Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky.” Asia Art Archive. Accessed December 2021, 1AD. https://aaa.org.hk/en/collections/search/library/japanese-art-after-1945-scream-against-the-sky. The New York Times art critic Holland Cotter lauded Morimura as a “star” and New York magazine's Mark Stevens highlighted his ability to effectively cross-fertilize “language, image, culture, and object” in his Playing with Gods (Night) (1991).Cotter, Holland. “ART REVIEW: Japan's Avant-Garde Makes Its Own Points.” The New York Times, September 16, 1994. https://www.nytimes.com/1994/09/16/arts/art-review-japan-s-avant-garde-makes-its-own-points.html.Stevens, Mark. “Made in Japan.” New York Magazine, September 26, 1994.
From 1994 to 1996, Morimura produced his Actress series in which he portrays mid-20th Century American and European actresses and film characters situated in Japanese locales.Landes, Nora. “Yasumasa Morimura: What a Drag.” Musee, June 9, 2015. https://museemagazine.com/culture/art-2/features/yasumasa-morimura-what-a-drag In Self-Portrait – Actress After Jodie Foster 2 (1996), Morimura fashions himself after Jodie Foster's prostitute character from Taxi Driver (1976) while seated on a red stool in an urban Tokyo alleyway littered with packets of cigarettes.
However, Morimura did not only restrict his Actress subjects to still photography as he breathed life into his roles through both live performance and a short film.