| Artist: | Yasumasa Morimura |
|
|---|---|---|
| Title: | Playing with Gods III: At Night | |
| Date: | 1991 | |
| Nationality: | Japanese | |
| Context: | Refiguring the Subject | |
| Movement: | ||
| Materials: | digitized photograph | |
| Subject: Morimura himself digitized twice as camerapacking tourists in a computer manipulated photographic revisualization of Cranach's "Christ on the Cross" (1503); he substitutes Japan's version of a blue-eyed Barbie for the crucified Christ; the Christian scene of sacrifice loses meaning when its mythologized subjects are replaced with remote Asians and the paraphernalia of economic consumption. In reworking the Western feminine ideal with Morimura addresses issues of race, gender, and nationality; transculturalism; hybrid identities in an age of image downloading. Style: creates 3-d tableaux to simulate the settings of the painting, then dresses and styles himself to resemble the figures in the painting; enters the scene and photographs himself as part of the scene. Applies digital computer-scanning techniques that enable him to merge 2 or more images of himself in the same picture; image cloning. Context: late 20th c. age of global capital, information, and image downloading; questions essentialism, the "natural" categories of East (Oriental) and West (Occidental) and the "natural" categories of masculine and feminine; explores a hybrid space in between dying binaries, one that thrives on disjunctions rather than fixed states Morimura as cultural critic; cross-dressing at its most radical; shows that fixed identity is an obsolete concept; also critiques Japan's culture of Western appropriation and commodification; revisionist art history; the gender switch recalls the tradition of Kabuki theater in which male actors take on the female roles. | ||
