Yasumasa Morimura 森村 泰昌

Yasumasa Morimura is known for recreating iconic works from art history by using his own body as the subject. This image references Francisco Goya’s The Third of May, 1808 (1814). Goya was commemorating Spanish resistance to Napoleon’s occupation.

For Morimura, using early modern European paintings as references is a form of investigation and critique:

I first started making self-portraits in 1985, using prosthetics, cosmetics, and sets to assume the roles of figures who signify more than themselves—individuals or works that have become archetypes, including old masters’ paintings. . . . I was trying to leap across binaries of categorization—masculine and feminine, East and West—as well as ideas such as the feminization of the East, Asia becoming synonymous with woman, the feminine mystique.

–Conor Moynihan, assistant curator of prints, drawings, and photographs