Visiting the Japan Society was an interesting experience for me. I had been unfamiliar with the artist, Yasumasa Morimura, up until our class trip to the exhibit, so I wasn’t sure how I was going to feel about his artwork. His style was so different from everything I’ve ever seen before, and I felt uncomfortable, yet so intrigued, standing there in the middle of the room, surrounded by famous imagery whose faces were replaced by his. There is something so intensely disturbing about taking something you’re so familiar with and altering it a little bit so that it suddenly becomes foreign to you. This reminded me of the concept of the “uncanny valley” which is the idea that as inanimate objects grow increasingly humanlike and lifelike, we become more and more repulsed by them because they act as if they were alive, yet they are not. With Yasumasa Morimura, he is presenting us with symbols we all recognize and know so well, yet they are not the originals.

Yasumasa Morimura is a conceptual photographer and filmmaker who uses props, costumes, makeup, and digital manipulation to turn himself into recognizable and iconic subjects, mostly from Western culture. By creating his own rendition of these famous, historical masterpieces, he is, in a way, challenging our association with the characters and forcing us to dissociate ourselves from the pieces in order to understand them in a completely new way. His artwork also pushes the boundaries between traditional racial, ethnic, and gender norms by transforming himself, a Japanese male, into Western female subjects. In doing so, he fuses artistic elements typically associated with Japanese culture into Western culture. One example of this technique can be seen in his appropriation of Manet’s Olympia. In his version, entitled Portrait (Futago), he replaces the floral shawl with a Japanese kimono decorated with cranes. By doing so, he is essentially bridging the gap between two very contrasting cultures and “obscuring” our previous attachments to the pieces.

Morimura’s exhibit, titled Ego Obscura, reminded me of a concept I had learned previously in my high school photography class – camera obscura. A camera obscura is a dark box with a tiny hole that projects an upside-down image of an object onto a screen inside. The image is inverted, which can be applied to what Morimura is doing with his work. He takes an object and turns it “upside-down” by putting his own unique twist to it and integrating contradictory elements into the pieces.

And, finally, the words “obscura” and “obscure” are both rooted in the Latin word “obscurus,” meaning “dark,” which has an Indo-European root meaning “cover.” We can identify examples of this in Yasumasa Morimura’s work, as he attempts to “obscure” the ego from famous portraiture. He wants to excavate “the self” from layers of art, Japanese, and personal history, and I believe that he has successfully accomplished that. Although his work can evoke feelings of eeriness and discomfort, I think that he does this intentionally in order to get us to fully open our minds to these new ideas that aim to invert the social norms of our society. Yasumasa Morimura is definitely an artist worth seeing and I think that it is important for his work to be recognized by the masses.