Yasumasa Morimura
[1] 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.
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.
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.
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.
[9] 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.
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 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.
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.
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 Zenkyōtō that occurred in the same auditorium on May 13, 1969.
[26] 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.
[28] 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.
[32] 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.
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.
[36] 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.
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.
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.
