[1] Ōura is best known for his controversial series of lithographs entitled Holding Perspective (1982–85), which include photographs of Emperor Hirohito, and have at been at the center of multiple high-profile censorship incidences in Japan since the mid-1980s.
He created the series as a way to delve into techniques undertaken by Japanese society and specifically the emperor, to absorb and assimilate into Western culture during the postwar period.
[7][5] Art historian Kenji Kajiya analyzed Holding Perspective for a workshop on modern and contemporary East Asian Art held at New York University in 2005, interpreting the series as Ōura's “postcolonial reconsideration of modern Japan's effort to assimilate into Western culture.”[10] Kajiya asserted that Ōura's use of Emperor Hirohito's photograph in these self-portraits was a way to explore the awkwardness the artist experienced during his ten-year stay in New York as a non-Western person becoming more and more assimilated into Western culture.
[9] Ōura has explained in his own words that, “there's an inner emperor inside of me that cannot be denied even if I attempt to refuse it.”[3] Most of the prints from the series carefully superimposed photographs of Emperor Hirohito in ways that highlighted his activities, dress, and stylization over the years against a variety of images and motifs that demonstrated Ōura's absorption in Western art techniques, such as sexual and racial fetishizations of the gaze and fragmentation of the human form (especially female) found in the work of Western artists such as Man Ray.
[11][5] However, two months after its conclusion, rightwing groups began to aggressively protest Holding Perspective, and Ōura's artwork was criticized at the Toyama Prefectural Assembly as unpleasant, disgraceful, and unpatriotic for its alleged mocking of the emperor.
[11] This wave of backlash was so aggressive that the museum director Ogawa Masataka (who was appointed by the prefectural governor) was prompted to withhold the four acquisitions from public display and unexpectedly return the six donated prints back to the artist.
[11] The exhibition's catalogue was finally made available to the public again four years later in 1990, following a consistent outpouring of criticism by supporters of the artist, the Japan Library Association, and appeals to freedom of expression by Social Democratic Party assemblyman Ishiguro Kazuo.
[5][6] Finally in 1993, it was revealed that the museum had sold the four pieces of Ōura's Holding Perspective series in its collection to an anonymous buyer and burned all 470 copies of the catalogue left in its possession.
[3][11][5] Afterward, the artist commented, "it is quite strange that the artworks bought by an administrative cultural institution using taxpayer money could be kept private and sold to anonymous individuals without public knowledge.
[7] However, the Okinawa Prefectural Art Museum's Director, Makino Hirotaka, decided against the inclusion of Ōura's work two months before the exhibition opening, citing "educational consideration" as the reason.
[17] Iida stated that most of the people who were against the exhibition had not actually seen it, and instead fixated on a few scenes of the artist from the film that had gone viral on social media, in which he uses a hand torch to burn his own prints from Holding Perspective (1982-85) that depict the emperor.
[8] While losing the court case prompted many people to dissuade him from investigating risky topics in his art, Ōura says that the censorship ordeal actually helped him to "clearly see the subject that [he] should engage with in this world as a creator.
An 87-minute avant-garde video work that delved into Ōura's issues of censorship with his print series of the same name, considering how the taboo of emperorism has been consciously and subconsciously twisted in modern Japanese society.
[21][22][8] The film features Shigenobu Mei visiting the home of South Korean poet Kim Chi-Ha, who was imprisoned in the 1970s for his opposition to the Park Chung Hee dictatorship.
[24] The film explores the story behind Misawa writing Emperor Game (天皇ごっこ, Tennō Gokkō) while sentenced to 12 years in prison for being involved in a murder case and his suicide in 2005.
He has helped organize and attended meetings and symposia on the topic, as well as worked with his supporters to publish a variety of pamphlets, articles, books and films to raise awareness of issues of nationalism, chauvinism, historical revisionism, and censorship.
[10] When artist and activist Hong Song-dam's large mural Sewol Owol was censored at the 2014 Gwanju Biennale in South Korea, Ōura incorporated statements of protest into his exhibited artworks as a show of support.