Yasumasa Morimura

Yasumasa Morimura in his studio in Osaka, 1990

Yasumasa Morimura ( Japanese 森村泰昌 Morimura Yasumasa ; born June 11, 1951 in Tennōji-ku , Osaka ) is a Japanese artist.

plant

He is a representative of Appropriation Art . Morimura staged herself, among other things, from photographs by Cindy Sherman , in which she portrayed herself in various disguises and roles ("film stills"). Since Sherman often slips into male roles as a woman in her pictures, while Morimura slips into female roles, the confusion of gender identity is increased even further.

Yasumasa Morimura belongs to the 2nd generation of appropriation artists. As part of this trend, he appropriates the artists of the 1st generation. While these ( Sturtevant , Pettibone, Lawler , Levine and others) are often about authorship , originality, intellectual property and signature , Morimura is more concerned with the discussion of gender , identity , difference . As in the "history portraits" by Cindy Sherman, he physically slips into the role of his chosen models, whereby he noticeably often uses the female model.

He develops the starting point taken over by Sherman by placing himself as a man in a framework she has created and is neither recognizable as a man at first glance, nor can any obvious differences from the original be made out at all. As a result of the supposed recognition of the familiar model, the viewer gets into an interactive guessing game by highlighting similarities and deviations, which in the further discussion is followed by a new, complex catalog of questions within a completely new context. In this one must now be asked about different levels of identity staging. In Morimura, identity must be understood as a whole, both as a gender and as a physical one.

Identity at Morimura

From a wide range of approaches in the postmodern discourse on the subject of identity, at least the following consensus can be derived: Identity is to be determined as a combination of personal characteristics that define the "essence" of a human individual. This combination becomes the starting point for individual action. Identity cannot be assumed to be a fixed quantity, but rather a constantly changing variable that is shaped by interaction. If one follows the considerations of Jacques Derrida , Michel Foucault , Judith Butler and other postmodern theorists on the subject of dynamic and constructed identity, it emerges that individuals are not autonomous or sovereign, but constructs of their time and also categories such as "male" or " female "not given by nature, but social constructs. All these different forms of "identitarian existence" are based on a process that is open to reinterpretation. The same applies to the various identities that Morimura creates for himself. For Yasumasa Morimura, "identity" can be understood as a synonym for a staged, "aesthetic self-concept".

In 1996 he was nominated for the Hugo Boss Prize .