Yasumasa Morimura continues to engage in a wide variety of fulfilling art practices. In recent years, Morimura has been involved in exhibitions and performances such as Yasumasa Morimura: Ego Obscura, Tokyo 2020 (2020) at the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, A Gift of the Sea, M-Style Morimura Yasumasaʼs Auto-Mythology (2021-2022) at the Artizon Museum, Shin Kyoeikitan (New Strange Tale of a Mirror Reflection) (2022), a collaboration with a Bunraku puppeteer Kanjuro Kiritake, and My Self-Portraits as a Theater of Labyrinths (2022) at the Kyoto City Kyocera Museum of Art. In addition, Morimura has organized special exhibitions at M@M (Morimura@Museum) in Kitakagaya, Osaka, and installed a public artwork at the Osaka University Nakanoshima Art Center. He is also writing a book titled Ikinobirutamenigeijutsuwahitsuyouka, meaning "Do we need art to survive?," which will be published by Kobunsha this April.

Morimura has been working on the theme of “I” for about 40 years, but what is "Yasumasa Morimura" after all?

In his work, he portrays art historical figures, film actresses, and historical figures, and in the real world, he is a photographer, a filmmaker, a writer, and a stage performer. It is as if a wide variety of identities are living together in one vessel called Yasumasa Morimura. Morimura rather affirms such “lack of unity, unorganized and scattered, mixing of different characters and values, and not creating a hierarchy,” and states that he would rather avoid “convergence to a fixed identity.”

Morimura’s latest, previously unexhibited, and recent works, which will be showcased in this exhibition, are composed of five sections (i.e., five characters) that have no relationship to each other and are developed in their own ways. Morimura is disguised as Tadaoto Kainosho, Napoleon, Miró’s paintings, Kafka, and Lu Xun. In a total of 14 works, the multiple identities of Morimura Yasumasa quietly and joyfully explode with dissonance.