Contemporary Japanese artist, Morimura conceived his work by simultaneously appropriating and subverting significant art historical masterpieces. Through his deconstruction of the notion of what is a “masterpiece,” Morimura calls into question our assumptions imparted on works by Western art history, celebrities, and comments on Japan’s absorption of Western culture.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Yasumasa Morimura, born in 1951 in Osaka, is a Japanese artist whose work deals with issues of cultural and sexual appropriation. Morimura studied art at Kyoto City University of Arts and in 1985 made his first avant-garde self-portrait based on an iconic portrait of Vincent Van Gogh. Since then, Morimura has taken iconic images from pop culture, and art history and deconstructed them using costumes, makeup, and digital manipulation to make self-portraits where Morimura alters himself into “others” beyond race, and gender.

Morimura has had solo exhibitions in Japan at the Museum of Contemporary Art, in Tokyo, the Yokohama Museum of Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Photography in Tokyo. His works are also found in many collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Getty Museum, in Los Angeles, the Museum of Fine Art, in Boston, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, in Chicago.

Your Mirror: Portraits from the ICP Collection

Self portraits

Yasumasa Morimura’s art is never quite what it seems. For his Daughters of Art History series, he restaged famous paintings, drawings, and photographs from the Western canon, using elaborate scenery props, costumes, and makeup. Morimura perfectly captures the mood, from an awkward position on a tiled floor to a dreamy expression, that appears in Cindy Sherman’s 1981 centerfold series. While Sherman is known for adopting stereotypical female personas in her work, here Morimura has assumed the role of Cindy Sherman herself. Morimura’s portraits of himself as a famous woman from Western art history and popular culture break down the binaries between male and female as well as East and West.

Copyright © Cindy Sherman

“Whenever I stand in front of a classical portrait painting (even if it is a print in a book of paintings), to me there is always a sense that the painting is a mirror. This feeling is especially apparent when the painting is a self-portrait of the artist. When looking at the self-portraits of Albrecht Durer and Rembrandt van Rijn and Frida Kahlo, for example, I gradually start to feel that the depicted figure is a self-portrait of myself, the very person looking at the painting. I come to the sense that I, the person standing before the ‘painting as a mirror,’ am the same as the figure reflected in the ‘painting as a mirror’ (that is, the figure portrayed in the painting). At the same time, I also experience the sensation of gradually becoming the person in the “painting as a mirror” as if I were staring at my own reflection. I physically sense that “I am Dürer (in the painting/mirror)” and “Dürer (in the painting/mirror) is me” at the same moment. It is as if we are not separate entities, but the mirror image of one another. This intimate relationship is extremely stimulating.”- Morimura