Yasumasa Morimura: My Self-Portraits as a Theater of Labyrinths

As part of its first anniversary exhibition, a solo exhibition by Yasumasa Morimura (b. Osaka, 1951), one of Japan’s leading contemporary artists has been held at Kyoto City KYOCERA Museum of Art. By creating self-portraits of himself as protagonists from art masterpieces, notable historical figures, and film actresses, Morimura has visualized the multiplicity of individual identities that include gender and race, while expressing the intersection of personal and world history. In recent years, he has held solo exhibitions at the Japan Society (2018), the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts (2017), the National Museum of Art, Osaka (2016), the Andy Warhol Museum (2013), and the Artizon Museum (October 2021–January 2022), in addition to serving as the artistic director for the Yokohama Triennale 2014 among other positions. He continues to be active as an artist both in Japan and overseas.

The exhibition comprises four sections: M’s Photo Corridor, Theater of Voices, Square for Dreams and Memories and Hidden Costume Closet. In addition to over 800 of Morimura’s treasured instant photographs taken since 1984, which have rarely been shown in public, the exhibition features a specially prepared acoustic space in which the audio from Morimura’s CD Faces, on which he reads his own novel written in 1994, is recreated as a closet drama. This is Morimura’s first large-scale solo exhibition in Kyoto since 1998, and the first attempt to reveal the entirety of his private world, which has continued for over thirty-five years.

Morimura’s expression, in which the self is deconstructed by taking the place of others to expose the multiple faces of the individual, shares similarities with the “selfie” that has been popularized by the evolution of smartphones and the spread of social media, and yet it also has a decidedly different aspect. In his images, one can discern Morimura’s penetrating gaze at the self, and an overwhelming affirmation of the multiple selves that a person can assume in their lives. By returning to the origin of his own production, this exhibition presents Morimura’s current state as he gropes for the future amidst the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Read the press release in full here.

For media enquiries, please contact pr@kyoto-museum.jp.