Yasumasa Morimura

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

Work

He is a representative of Appropriation Art Morimura staged themselves, among other things based on photographs of Cindy Sherman, in which she portrayed herself in various guises and roles ( "Film Stills" ). Since Sherman often slips as a woman in her paintings in male roles, Morimura, however, occurs as a transvestite, the confusion of gender identity is further increased. Yasumasa Morimura part of the second generation of artists to appropriation. as part of this flow, he appropriated the artists of the first generation. During it, these ( Sturtevant, Pettibone, Lawler, Levine uA ) often is authorship, originality, intellectual property, and signing up Morimura employs more with the debate about gender, identity, difference. As in "history portraits" by Cindy Sherman, he slips physically in the role of his chosen models, which he thereby remarkably often the female model uses. he developed as adopted by Sherman starting point further, he goes as a man in a created by her frame and can be seen neither at first glance as a man, yet obvious allow differences to the original ever make. The viewer gets as a result of the alleged recognition of known prototype in an interactive guessing game, by putting forth of similarities and differences, bringing in further discussion followed by a new, complex questions in an entirely new context. In this must now be prompted for various levels of identity production. The identity must at Morimura as a whole, be conceived both as a social gender, as well as physical.

Identity at Morimura

From a broad range of approaches in the postmodern discourse on identity following consensus can at least be taken: identity is noted as a combination of personal characteristics that define the " essence" of a human individual. This combination is the starting point of individual action. The identity can not be assumed as a constant, but is rather an ever-changing variable that is influenced by interaction. If you follow the ideas of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler and other theorists of postmodernism on the subject of dynamic and constructed identity implies that individuals are not autonomous or sovereign, but constructs its time and also categories such as "male" or " female " is not natural, but social constructs. All these different forms of " identity- existence " is based on a more open to reinterpretation process. The same applies to the various identities that Morimura creates of. "Identity" can be understood in Yasumasa Morimura as a synonym for a staged, " aesthetic self-concept ".

He was nominated for the Hugo Boss Prize in 1996.