Yasumasa Morimura

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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.

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. 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 Edouard 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. 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. 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. 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. 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).

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. 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.

In 1995, Morimura had a video recorded in which the camera shows the massive Yasuda Auditorium classroom at Tokyo University’s Komaba campus as students sit at their desks and prepare for their professor’s lecture. Unbeknownst to them, Morimura arrives dressed as Marilyn Monroe (who he refers to as “Actress M”) and proceeds to run around shouting and gesticulating before standing atop a desk at the front of the room. Morimura strikes a pose that mimics Monroe’s famous performance in The Seven Year Itch (1955). Although he was in character as a white, female American actress, the performance was both a reference to and an indirect recreation of the right-wing writer Yukio Mishima’s infamous debate with the left-wing student group Zenkyoto that occurred in the same auditorium on May 13, 1969. While Morimura admitted he did not research the event in great detail, he has continually referenced how Mishima’s theatrically expressive opposition to the “cultural castration” and consumerism of Japan moved him to consider the importance of art’s authenticity in a Japanese context. As a commentary on Mishima’s vehement opposition to the perceived feminization of Japan in the Post-World War II era, Morimura decided to reinterpret the event from the polar opposite standpoint of a recognizably female subject and symbol of popular media consumption, Marilyn Monroe.

In preparation for the Yokohama Museum of Art’s exhibition The Sickness Unto Beauty – Self-portrait as Actress (April 1996 – June 1996), Morimura was commissioned to appear in a short film as part of the show’s focus on his recent Actress series. The experimental filmmaker Takashi Itoh directed Apparatus M (1996) that features Morimura as Marilyn Monroe. The film was screened in a classic-style theater venue contained within the museum’s exhibition space to evoke the connections between Monroe and the filmgoing culture of the Golden Age of Hollywood.

For Fall-Winter 1996-7, the Japanese fashion designer Issey Miyake invited Morimura to create a design to be printed on garments from Miyake's first "Guest Artists" collaboration. Miyake's manifesto was to produce clothing offering an “interactive relationship between art and the person who admires it,” and Morimura provided Miyake with collages reproducing Ingres's 1856 nude painting La Source, and self-portraits showing himself inverted and draped in red tulle. Another design showed the nude Morimura emerging from behind a life-sized cutout of La Source.

Career (2000–present)

Starting in the late-1990s, advancements in digital camera and computer technology permitted Morimura a broader range of creative tools to visually manipulate and alter his portrait compositions and subjects’ appearances such as PhotoShop.

There are multiple examples of works in which Morimura inserted his countenance onto non-human subjects. Singing Sunflowers (1998) is a color photograph print based on Vincent van Gogh’s still life Sunflowers (1888) in that it retains the exact same floral arrangement, color palette, and interior space from the original painting. However, Morimura digitally replicates his face to appear on each of the sunflowers’ heads at different angles.

In tandem with his art, Morimura was appointed as a professor at Kyoto University of Art and Design’s International Research Center for the Arts from 2004 to 2006. Alongside the artists Hiroshi Senju and Tatsuo Miyajima, he was selected as an artist-in-residence in which he was tasked with educating University-level visual arts fellows. The intent of the program was to foster a new generation of artistic production in Kyoto that could be shared with the rest of the world.

Morimura’s Requiem series (2006) denoted a significant shift in the content of his self-portraits. With an embedded interest in Modern Japanese and world history, Morimura was attracted to specific historical figures and how their power and influence shaped their national surroundings. This marked a brief departure from Morimura’s typically female and Art History-rooted subjects in that he chose to portray masculine figures: Japanese right-wing writer and political agitator Yukio Mishima, actor Charlie Chaplin as a parodic Adolf Hitler from The Great Dictator (1940), Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara, and Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong.

In December 2012, a formal announcement revealed that Morimura was selected as the Artistic Director of the 2014 installment of the Yokohama Triennale art festival.

Morimura debuted his first feature-length film, Ego Symposium, in 2016. Returning to the Art History-laden content of his work from the 1980s to the 2000s, Morimura embodies the roles of eleven distinguished artists from the Art History canon: Andy Warhol, Frida Kahlo, Vincent van Gogh, Johannes Vermeer, Diego Velazquez, Jan van Eyck, Leonardo da Vinci, Albrecht Durer, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Rembrandt van Rijn, and Louise Vigee Le Brun. This moving image work consists of vignettes in which each of the artists deliver a dramatic monologue on the nature of selfhood, identity, and how it relates to their artistry. As a humorous statement on self, Morimura expresses in the opening that Marcel Duchamp will be referenced but that “... because Mr. Duchamp is of the opinion that absence is a testament to existence, he will not be joining us today”; in his place, Morimura inserts himself as both a character and the moderator of the meeting between the eleven artists.

Similar to Ego Symposium’s filmic format, Nippon Cha Cha Cha! (2018) is a multimedia work that combines film and live theatrical performance. Morimura portrays a diverse set of characters in an assessment of how Japan’s identity is shaped by American culture following the end of the Allied Occupation in 1952. As Showa Emperor Hirohito, General Douglas MacArthur, actress Marilyn Monroe, and writer Yukio Mishima, the work is a blend of historical and autobiographical references. During one of the film’s scenes, Morimura recreates the historic photograph of the meeting between Emperor Hirohito and General MacArthur but switches the original location from the American ambassador’s residence to his childhood home and parents’ tea shop. These scenes were intended to signify Morimura’s understanding of the complex relationship between America’s influence on Japanese culture and how it led to his internal conflict as to what it means to identify as “Japanese” in the 20th and 21st Centuries. During the live performance component, Morimura enters the stage wearing the same military uniform as Mishima and is armed with a scroll. Before the audience, Morimura reads a declaration that argues for the essentiality of art as a reference to the politically-charged speech Mishima delivered on fascism at Tokyo’s Ground Self-Defense Force camp before he committed ritualistic suicide on November 25, 1970.

Although Morimura’s art has been the subject of dozens of group and solo exhibitions around the world since his public debut in the 1980s, the 2018 retrospective of his career at The Japan Society, Yasumasa Morimura: Ego Obscura (October 2018 – January 2019), was his first institutional solo exhibition in New York and was met with all-around praise by art critics and publications, from The New York Times and The Brooklyn Rail, to Hyperallergic and The Eye of Photography.

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