Yasumasa Morimura is a conceptual photographer and filmmaker from Osaka, Japan. Using a combination of props, costumes, makeup, and digital manipulation, Morimura produces self portraits in which he inserts himself into art historical masterpieces, as well as images sourced from mass media and popular culture. Morimura’s self portraits simultaneously appropriate, subvert, and reinvigorate their source material; deconstructing the notion of the “masterpiece,” while also examining Japan’s complex absorption of Western culture, and undermining the concept of the “male gaze.”
Morimura’s work has been presented in solo exhibitions around the world, and is held in the collections of such prominent institutions as the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City; The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh.