his arrival with his 1990Daughter of Art History
exhibition in Tokyo. Morimura’s photographs are
large, glamorous, and playful, but they also have a
serious intent. Whereas modernist art is often ico-
noclastic, Morimura’s postmodernism can best be
described as iconoplastic. He manipulates some of
the most celebrated images from the history of
western painting, twentieth-century poster art,
and contemporary culture to make accepted images
provocative once again. He achieves this primarily
by using the crafts and techniques associated with
movie-making: building sets, creating costumes
and makeup, carefully controlling the lighting,
and using himself as model. He works primarily
in sequences such asMarilyn,Mona Lisa,orJudith
(after Cranach the Elder’sJudith with the Head of
Holofernes) in which the settings of the pictures, the
relationships of the elements of the picture, and its
tone are changed from one photograph to the next,
tracing a narrative of the image’s deconstruction.
Morimura is often compared to the American
Cindy Sherman because of their shared penchant
for tongue-in-cheek tableaux and sexually subver-
sive self-portraits. Morimura acknowledges her
influence in his photograph ‘‘To My Little Sister:
for Cindy Sherman’’ (1998)—which reprises Sher-
man’s ‘‘Untitled #96’’ (1981)—with himself as the
subject. Sherman’s main influence comes through
herUntitled Film Stills(1977–1980) andHistory
Portraits (1989–1990) in which her self-portraits
are at their most iconic and most disruptive of
gender stereotypes.
Three crucial differences exist, however, in Mor-
imura’s work that set him apart from Sherman.
First, whereas Sherman is a woman dressing as a
woman for her pictures, Morimura often, but not
exclusively, cross-dresses as a woman, changing the
nature of the challenge to essentialist views of art
and gender in the photographs. Second, Morimura
is Japanese and thus ethnically different from the
western celebrities whose images he emulates, his
work alluding to such aspects of contemporary life
as cultural colonialism and racial stereotyping.
Finally, Morimura uses specific images rather
than generic ones, dealing with cultural icons as a
genre rather than exploring the genres that an ico-
nic image might represent. For example, he made a
number of Marilyn Monroe pictures based on sev-
eral of the most famous images of the actress,
whereas Sherman’sUntitled Film Stillsare original,
anonymous pictures based on the genre that the
Monroe pictures embody.
By inscribing himself into pictures where the
central character often is neither male, Japanese,
nor an artist, Morimura destabilizes assumptions
about gender, nationality, or race, and the function
of the artist. Morimura’s best-known and difficult
images are those in which he appears in the place of
an alluring icon of femininity, often making little
attempt to disguise that he is male and very unlike
the original subject. By doing so, Morimura
deflects the prurient heterosexual male gaze which
he feels determined the ‘‘originals,’’ and he can be
understood as a cross-dressing male artist in the
western tradition or as anonnagata, (men who play
women characters) in the Japanesekabukitradi-
tion. Whether understood within one or both of
these traditions, he reminds us that the object of
desire is always determined by convention. This is
best exemplified by his Self-Portrait (Actress)/
Black Marilyn(1996), in which he reprises Marilyn
Monroe’s famous skirt-blown-up pose, except that
in this picture Morimura, rather than Marilyn, has
let the black skirt blow up to reveal a large, fake
semi-erect phallus complete with bushy black pubic
hair. The photograph trumps the coy concealment
of conventional desire through three ‘‘revelations’’:
Morimura is pretending to be Marilyn Monroe
‘‘revealing’’ the epitome of male desire as male;
Marilyn’s famous holding down of the skirt is
‘‘revealed’’ as an attempt to hide a prosthetic
penis; the black pubic hair (of Black Marilyn)
‘‘reveals’’ that this most famous of blonde models
is a bottle blonde.
In the late twentieth century, the flow of transna-
tional capital was marked in the public conscious-
ness by the more visible flow of images across
national borders. With a picture likeSelf-Portrait
(Actress)/After Catherine Deneuve 3(1996), Mor-
imura highlights the orientalist bias of the original
picture. In the original poster, the exotic Japanese
setting sells the star to the western audience for her
films after whom eastern audiences are encouraged
to model themselves. By replacing Deneuve with a
Japanese face, the image that had first arrived in
Japan as a western image selling the Japanese an
orientalized western view of themselves is re-appro-
priated as an ironic Japanese view of orientalism.
Morimura provokes a similar reappraisal of
Manet’s Olympia, redone as Portrait (Futago)
(1988–1990). By making Olympia a Japanese
model, Morimura highlights the racially motivated
demotion of the Black figure who stands behind
her, a character neglected not only by Manet but
also by the feminist critics that had argued on
behalf of Olympia in the 1980s.
Morimura was trained as a painter at the Kyoto
City University of Arts, and in his early work, he
often used his skills in this area to create his images.
At the end of the century, he moved more towardsMORIMURA, YASUMASA