Yasumasa Morimura “In the Room of Art History” at Luhring Augustine

Luhring Augustine Bushwick is pleased to present Yasumasa Morimura: In the Room of Art History, the artist’s eighth solo show with the gallery.

At the center of Morimura’s photographs is the artist himself in full disguise. For decades Morimura has challenged the conventions of self-portraiture by assuming the likeness of others, demonstrating the plasticity of identity. His approach to image-making stems from a desire to step into and inhabit pictorial space. Using props, makeup, costumes, and digital manipulation, Morimura embodies the personas of prominent figures in history, art, and entertainment as they are represented in popular visual culture. Finding inspiration predominantly within Western iconography, Morimura recasts his subjects and considers his own internalization of the imagery, a reflection of the influx of Western culture in the postwar era in his native Japan. Though his images are not exact duplicates, they bear an uncanny resemblance to their respective sources, operating in a space in which fiction blends with reality, and thereby disrupting the audience’s preexisting associations of the depicted subjects.