Before we visited the Japan Society Gallery, I was very curious as to what kind of artist would Yasumasa Morimura be, since we were going to visit a gallery located so close to the United Nation that only exhibits his artwork, which impelled me to believe that he must be a significant figure in the art field as he was chose as the one to represent Japanese art in a foreign country. The result turned out that Yasumasa Morimura indeed possesses some unique or even eccentric characters that distinguishes himself from the rest of others.
The first feature that I realized during the visit was that almost all of Yasumasa Morimura’s paintings were recreation of paintings from other famous artists, but with his own face in the painting. He painted himself as the figure in the painting regardless of gender or ethnicity, which appeared to be very odd to me at the first sight. Then my question was partially answered by the movie in the background, which documented his thoughts behind the recreations, he said that dressing himself up as the other figure enabled him to feel what the other felt in their life, no matter he was a European noble or a warrior. The experience of being able to shift to another personal identity beyond the limit of time, gender and social class is perhaps one of the reasons that attracts Yasumasa Morimura to continue this form of art.
However, even after watching the movie, I would be honest and say Yasumasa Morimura was still an eccentric artist to me. I thought that he might be one of those artists who had his own peculiarity to disguise himself through the mask of others. But as I visited more, I slowly realized that most of Yasumasa Morimura’s recreations were related to famous artworks of Western origin, examples like the classical Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci, the Sunflowers by Van Gogh, the Olympia by Édouard Manet, which were created during the time when Western culture dominated the world. Painting himself in those world-renown pieces is probably the means that Yasumasa Morimura utilizes to insert Japanese or Asian elements in the art, through which he intended to draw attentions from the mainstream to the omitted Asian art during the same era.
After the visit, I still believe that Yasumasa Morimura isone of the most eccentric artists that I have known, but I also begin to appreciate his skilly-crafted artworks and the effort he devoted in emphasizing the significance of the past Asian art which people have typically omitted.
