Yasumasa Morimura

Morimura’s method begins with Portrait (Van Gogh) of 1985. ShugoArts describes the work after this point as a sustained series of self-portraits in which Morimura becomes “something” or “someone,” incorporating research, dioramas, sets, costumes, and makeup into the production process. ^*1 This form grew out of the art education and visual culture of postwar Japan in which Morimura came of age. In a lecture, Morimura stated that art education in Japan had been Westernized since the Meiji period and became even more deeply shaped by Euro-American values after the defeat in World War II. As a student, he said, he mainly studied Van Gogh, Monet, and Renoir, with few opportunities to encounter Japanese art history. ^*27 Hara Museum also presents his education in postwar Osaka, born under Allied occupation and amid a void where prewar teachings had been pushed aside and Western values entered, as an important background to Ego Obscura. ^*7 Even with this historical background, the 1985 starting point did not appear as a fully formed critique of art history. In a 2016 interview, Morimura said that he did not yet know Western art history in depth, and that he had received Van Gogh through reproductions and the popular image of “the man of fire.” ^*20 In another interview, he explained that he identified the young, suffering Van Gogh with his own discomfort, and that when he saw Van Gogh’s self-portrait, it felt like seeing himself in a mirror. ^*22 This experience led toward a form in which the self is seen through an already known image of another person. In an ARTLOGUE interview, Morimura also recalled that a large color self-portrait appeared suddenly in 1985 and became the beginning of his current style. ^*21 The National Museum of Art, Osaka places Portrait (Van Gogh), first shown at Gallery 16 in Kyoto in 1985, as an early key work that opened Morimura’s self-portraiture toward art history. ^*2 In 1988, he took part in the Aperto section of the Venice Biennale and, with Portrait (Futago), based on Manet’s Olympia, placed a familiar masterpiece of Western art and the body of a Japanese man in the same image. ^*4 At the same time, artists associated with the Pictures Generation in Europe and the United States were using advertising, cinema, and existing photographs to examine photography as a medium that produces shared social patterns instead of simply transmitting reality. ^*23 Morimura did not repeat that movement in Japan as it stood. He built a method that transferred the figures he had received through reproductions of Western art, Hollywood cinema, and news photographs into his own body through costume, makeup, sets, and performance. Hara Museum’s retrospective text explains that he has reenacted painting, cinema, and historical moments, constructing his work as a meta-commentary that crosses time, race, and gender. ^*7 For that reason, it is not enough to summarize Morimura as an artist who “dressed as masterpieces.” His photographs need to be read as work that shows what shifts inside the photographic image when postwar Japanese culture receives Western art, Hollywood cinema, and news photographs, and then performs them again through the artist’s own body.

Making the Body a Site of Quotation

Morimura’s self-portraits are not disguises made to conceal his bare face. They are acts of rebuilding, through his own body, faces and poses remembered from reproductions, cinema, and news photographs. ShugoArts describes his work as self-portraiture that involves careful research, dioramas and sets, costumes, and makeup. ^*1 Photography here is not a medium that merely records a completed disguise. It fixes the body, costume, makeup, background, lighting, and print into a single image, making visible the gap between the source image and Morimura’s own body. If the likeness were complete, it would approach replication. If it were too distant, it would fail as quotation. Morimura’s photographs hold that intermediate dissonance, showing how deeply masterpieces, films, and historical photographs have been remembered as familiar types. Self-portraiture is thereby shifted from a form that directly reveals the artist’s interiority to one that rereads shared figures through the body.

Portrait (Van Gogh) and the Entry into Masterpieces

Portrait (Van Gogh) is one of the early works that most clearly shows Morimura’s method. The National Museum of Art, Osaka registers the work as a photograph from 1985, providing a concrete point of departure for his early self-portraiture. ^*3 The subject here is not the historical Van Gogh himself, but the image of Van Gogh widely shared through art books, exhibitions, reproductions, and explanatory texts. Morimura later said that, at the time of making the work, he did not know Van Gogh in depth and remembered him through reproductions and the phrase “the man of fire.” ^*20 At the same time, he also said that when he saw Van Gogh’s self-portrait, it felt as if he were looking at himself in a mirror. ^*22 Portrait (Van Gogh) therefore presents less an accurate recreation of Van Gogh than a transfer of the “Van Gogh-ness” Morimura had received into his own face and body. It brings to the surface the knowledge and stories through which the figure of the artist has been believed. In place of a photograph that proves the authenticity of the self, it begins a photography that thinks about the self through another face.

Portrait (Futago) and the Assumptions of Looking at a Masterpiece

Portrait (Futago) directs Morimura’s method toward art history, sex, and race with particular clarity. Mori Art Museum describes the work as based on Manet’s Olympia and notes that Morimura performs both the “white prostitute” and the “black maid” through the body of a Japanese man. ^*4 Viewers who know Manet’s Olympia read the nude woman, the maid, the frontal gaze, and the difference in skin color through their knowledge of art history. When Morimura appears as a Japanese man performing both roles at once, the divisions that had seemed settled within the masterpiece become unstable. This substitution is not a simple critique of Manet. It is a way of exposing, within the image, the habits of knowledge and looking that viewers bring to the act of seeing a masterpiece. SFMOMA’s collection entry presents the work as a chromogenic print from 1988, also confirming its place in an international photographic collection. ^*5 In this sense, Portrait (Futago) can be read less as a parody of Manet than as a work that rearranges the premises for looking at a masterpiece inside a single body.

The “I” Extending to Actresses, Kahlo, and Historical Photographs

Morimura’s self-portraiture is not directed only toward Western painting. The National Museum of Art, Osaka’s retrospective text presents his transformations into protagonists of masterpieces, film actresses, and historical figures as Morimura’s “my art history.” ^*2 An inner dialogue with Frida Kahlo (Flower wreath and tears), held by NGV, reconstructs the emblematic modern self-image of Frida Kahlo through Morimura’s own body. ^*6 Here, the “I” does not remain enclosed within the artist’s private interior. It emerges through another face, another costume, another pain, and another mythology. The force of Morimura’s photographs lies in the way they refuse to fix the object of disguise as either homage or satire. He neither simply takes the subject nor fully assimilates into it. He preserves a distance between the subject and himself, and within that distance he shows how unstable gender, nationality, and cultural memory can be.

Photographic Reenactment and the Likeness That Never Fully Matches

The Getty Museum’s text for Photo Reenactment explains that since the early 1980s, Morimura has reenacted famous paintings and cast himself within them. ^*8 The same text adds that his works do more than reproduce their sources: they include homage, satire, and anachronistic elements while raising questions of gender, race, and cultural identity. ^*8 As this description suggests, Morimura’s reenactments are not attempts to return faithfully to the source image. They are ways of testing how the authority of the source image has been maintained, by which bodies, in which periods, and through what forms of performance. Photographic reenactment can seem to bring the past into the present. In Morimura’s case, however, the past never returns unchanged. The texture of the face, the placement of the body, the excess of the costume, and the artificiality of the set remain somewhere in the image as a mismatch. That mismatch makes visible the roles and desires behind images that have been placed at the center of art history.

Postwar Japan’s Reception of the West and the Position of the Self

Morimura’s work cannot be understood as a view of Western art history from the outside. It is grounded in an experience of learning, becoming familiar with, and feeling distance from Euro-American culture within postwar Japan. In a lecture, Morimura stated that under the American occupation after the war, Westernization extended across lifestyle, political thought, eating habits, and art education. At school, oil painting and Western art were given as the standard of “art” more often than nihonga or Japanese art history. ^*27 ShugoArts’s text for My Chronicle 1985–2018 also places the background of his work in a self born in the Showa era and the twentieth century, noting Japan’s encounter with Western civilization since the Meiji period and the strong influence of American culture after the defeat in World War II. ^*16 Seen from this angle, Morimura’s performances of Van Gogh, Manet, or Velázquez are not simply attempts to approach Western art. They place his body inside Western images he had received from childhood as “art,” photographing both the self that had become familiar with those images and the self that appears as something out of place within them. In the same lecture, Morimura explained that his self-portraits place the Japanese face and body he possesses into figures from Western art history, bringing Japanese and Western elements into the same space while keeping their differences from being completely blended. ^*27 As Artizon Museum’s Jam Session reread modern Japanese painting, including Aoki Shigeru’s A Gift of the Sea, through Morimura’s method, this question does not end with Western art. It also turns toward modern Japanese art and museum collections. ^*9 Morimura’s photographs do not simply line up East and West as opposing terms. They show the dissonance that arises when a body formed within postwar Japan’s close reception of Euro-American culture is placed inside those images.

Self-Portraiture as Place, Improvisation, and Process

Morimura’s self-portraiture is made through more than the reconstruction of finished masterpieces. ShugoArts’s text for My Chronicle 1985–2018 presents his trajectory from early Polaroid-like on-site works to the art history and actress series. ^*16 What matters here is that self-portraiture does not remain confined to the studio. It develops into a wider form that includes place, travel, exhibition, documentation, and process. For Morimura, the “I” is not a fixed subject. It is a provisional position remade again and again before places, images, and histories. In his photographs, even though the artist’s face appears repeatedly, the identity of the author does not become stronger. As the same face continues to enter different roles, the self appears as an accumulation of quotation and performance, not as a single core.

Portrait (Van Gogh), 1985

Portrait (Van Gogh) is an early work in which Morimura clarified his method of inserting his own body into Western art history. The National Museum of Art, Osaka registers the work as a photograph from 1985 and identifies its materials as C-print and offset print. ^*3 The work is an attempt to recreate a masterpiece through photography, and at the same time to transform the painter’s self-portrait into the photographer’s own performance. In a painted self-portrait, the painter is both the subject who depicts and the object depicted. In Morimura’s case, that doubleness is layered with the performance of becoming another person, the documentary fixity of the photograph, and the viewer’s sense of recognition.

Portrait (Futago), 1988 and 1989

Portrait (Futago) is one of the representative works in which Morimura’s intervention into art history appears most sharply. Mori Art Museum holds the work as a 1989 piece and describes it as based on Manet’s Olympia, with Morimura performing the two roles in the image. ^*4 SFMOMA’s collection page, meanwhile, registers a 1988 Portrait (Futago) as a chromogenic print, confirming that the same subject has circulated internationally through multiple versions and collections. ^*5 In this work, questions of who is looked at, who is placed in a role of service, and who is treated as a subject of art history are layered within one body. Morimura’s photographs exceed the category of “disguise photography” because these overlapping roles destabilize the viewer’s position as well.

An inner dialogue with Frida Kahlo, 2001

An inner dialogue with Frida Kahlo (Flower wreath and tears) shows how Morimura’s self-portraiture extended beyond Western masterpieces to modern images of female authorship and pain. The National Museum of Art, Osaka’s retrospective text describes the “Frida in Me (Flower Wreath)” series as works that celebrate the love and death in Frida Kahlo’s life from Morimura’s own perspective. ^*2 NGV’s collection entry also presents the work as a color photograph from 2001, confirming the reception of Morimura’s transformation into Kahlo within an international collection. ^*6 Here, Morimura does not simply borrow Kahlo’s pain or self-image. He passes the strong image of Kahlo as an artist through his own body, showing how the “I” multiplies and wavers when it wears another face.

From Photography to Video, Performance, and the Museum

Morimura’s method extends beyond individual photographs into video, performance, exhibition structure, and dialogue with museums. Kyoto City KYOCERA Museum of Art’s Morimura Yasumasa: My Self-Portraits as a Theater of Labyrinths introduces him as a pioneer of self-portraiture and explains that his transformations into masterpieces, historical figures, and film actresses make visible multiple identities, including gender and race. ^*10 Hara Museum’s Ego Obscura was structured as a retrospective that included photographs alongside video, lecture-performance, and references to modern Japanese history. ^*7 This expansion shows that Morimura’s photography is not completed within a single image. For him, photography is a medium that preserves the disguised body and, at the same time, a central device for creating a theatrical field that includes exhibition space, language, history, and the viewer.

Photographic Quotation and Appropriation Through the Body

Morimura can be read alongside appropriation and the Pictures Generation from the 1980s onward. Yet if his work is grouped too quickly under the “use of existing images,” his method becomes harder to see. In a 2018 interview, Morimura said that since 1985 he had used artificial eyes, makeup, and sets in an attempt to go beyond classifications such as male and female, East and West. ^*12 The Metropolitan Museum of Art explains that Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, Sherrie Levine, and others used film scenes, advertising photographs, and masterpieces of modern photography to examine codes of representation. ^*23 Levine’s After Walker Evans, in which she rephotographed Walker Evans’s photographs from a catalogue, is also described by the Centre Pompidou as a work that questions authorship, originality, and authenticity. ^*24 Morimura, by contrast, does more than rephotograph a source image as another photograph. He takes on the figure inside the image as his own role. The center of quotation shifts from photographic reproduction itself to the body, skin, gender, costume, and the position of the gaze.

The comparison with Sherman becomes clearer when this difference is kept in view. MoMA explains that although Sherman is her own model, Untitled Film Stills are not considered self-portraits; instead, she places herself in dialogue with stereotypes of femininity. ^*18 M+’s two-person exhibition, by contrast, presents Morimura and Sherman as artists who both use masquerade to explore relations among identity, mass media, and history, while remaking images from masterpieces, cinema, and popular culture from their own cultural backgrounds. ^*17 The Art Newspaper also notes that the two were not aware of each other from the beginning of their careers, and that Morimura later learned about Sherman through a Japanese magazine. ^*19 Their relation is therefore better understood as a parallel development rather than a single line of influence from the late 1970s through the 1980s, when photography began to address identity through performance, cinema, and reproduced images.

Morimura has also been read in relation to Duchamp’s use of aliases and disguise. MEM’s exhibition text introduces the Doublonage series Morimura made in the 1980s, based on Duchamp’s Chocolate Grinder and Fresh Widow. ^*25 QAGOMA’s commentary also reads Doublonnage (Marcel) as a work in which Morimura takes up the pose of Duchamp’s female alter ego Rrose Sélavy, as photographed by Man Ray, connecting it to reversals of gender roles and tensions between Eastern and Western images. ^*26 In this light, Morimura’s photographs are not simply imitations of masterpieces. They can be placed as attempts to rearrange, through the body, who becomes the author, who becomes the model, and who is positioned as the viewer within existing images.

Institutional Reception and International Reassessment

Morimura’s works have been received through museums, galleries, international exhibitions, and photographic collections. MoMA’s artist page registers Morimura as a Japanese artist and presents Ambiguous Beauty (Aimai-no-bi) as part of its collection. ^*13 NGV’s artist page identifies him as a Japanese artist born in Osaka and shows, through multiple collection works, that his work has entered international museum collections. ^*14 In Japan, institutions including The National Museum of Art, Osaka, Kyoto City KYOCERA Museum of Art, Hara Museum, and Artizon Museum have reread Morimura’s self-portraiture as a dialogue with art history, cinema, modern Japan, and institutional collections. Luhring Augustine’s CV lists his solo exhibitions, international exhibitions, and major collections, confirming the institutional reception of his work across photography, art, and performance. ^*11 This breadth of reception helps explain why Morimura’s work is referenced within both Japanese contemporary art and discussions of photography after postmodernism.

What Morimura Changed in Photographic History

Morimura matters in photographic history because he changed self-portraiture from a form that “photographs me” into one that shows which historical image the “I” takes on and where it slips out of that role. The Getty Museum’s exhibition on photographic reenactment places Morimura among artists who revisit art history and identity through photography. ^*8 Japan Society’s catalogue introduction for Ego Obscura also presents more than thirty years of his work as a reassessment within global contemporary art. ^*15 Morimura’s photographs do not record reality, nor do they simply express the artist’s interior life. By placing his own body inside figures from masterpieces, film stars, and news photographs, they show how photography makes history believable, how it produces subjects, and how it organizes the viewer’s desires. His work can therefore be positioned as an expansion of the act of photographing into looking, performing, quoting, and questioning.