Yasumasa Morimura: Ego Obscura

Contemporary artist and provocateur, Yasumasa Morimura, captivates New York with his first major show, Ego Obscura, this fall in New York City. Morimura creates tableaux vivants with himself as the main character in the style of Cindy Sherman—while simultaneously drawing from and reinventing Western popular culture from the Renaissance to contemporary times. As the title of the show implies, Morimura’s chameleon-like personas from Leonardo da Vinci to the prostitute in Manet’s Olympia, subsume the artist, and blur the boundaries of gender, time, nationality, historical truth and power dynamics. The exhibition features Morimura’s first feature-length film, Ego Symposium, where he portrays 12 well-known self-portraitists.