A little under two weeks ago, I visited the Ego Obscura exhibit of contemporary artist Yasumasa Morimura at the Japan Society in NYC. According to the pamphlet given out at the gallery, this exhibit was a thirty year project by Yasumasa Morimura in which “excavates the self from layers of art history, Japanese postwar history, and personal history”. Truthfully, I am not entirely certain what “excavating the self” means, but it was very interesting to look at how the artist seemingly metamorphized into different historical figures, whether it be war generals as in the work where his likeness is replacing the face of general Douglas Mcarthur as well as the face of Emperor Hirohito in a famous photograph where two of the most prominent military figures of World War II are posing for a photo after the war’s conclusion, or some of the most famous art figures of history such as Leonardo Da Vinci or Vincent Van Gogh.  In fact, in the case of Vincent Van Gogh, Morimura seemed to transform into the nintienth century French impressionist so well that I barely recognized the between Van Gogh’s famous self portrait and Morimura’s take on the painting with his face replacing Van Gogh’s.

This visit to the Japan Society made me quite interested in Yasumasa Morimura and the reason why he chose such a different and unconventional style of art that became known as appropriation. As an artist who practices appropriation, Morimura chooses some of the most reknowned and famous images from history and replaces the subject of set images with his own face and body. At first I could not understand why the artist would choose to alter such famous historical pieces or why he felt he felt the need to portray himself as different people, many of whom were of a different nationality, race, ethnicity, and sometimes even gender, as he did in the work where he replaced early twentieth century painter Frida Kahlo’s face with his own, which I admittedly was more than slightly confused by. However, after reading a little bit about Yusamasa Morimura I learned that his motivation to insert his face into paintings and photos where the subject differs from him physically in every imaginable aspect was to challenge cultural standards and expectations of traditional art. He felt like he needed to overturn the traditional norms of race, ethnicity, and gender, a motivation that I feel sets him apart from the vast majority of artists.