The Second Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art exhibition catalogue (APT2)

Vasumasa88RIIIRA Lives and works in Osaka, Japan Blinded by the light 1991 Colour photograph with surface varnished.3/3 Triptych:200x386cm (overall, framed);200x121cm (each panel) Collection: Queensland Art Gallery Blinded by the light 1991 takes Pieter Bruegel's The parable of the blind 1568 as its initial source. The background of Bruegel's painting, with its church, village and trees remains the same, and yet not quite, for Morimura's work is a large-scale colour photograph, and Bruegel's medium is oil paint. Instead of six blind men lurching across the foreground of Bruegel's painting, Morimura depicts six contemporary models of excess, all of whom are played by himself. Bruegel's blind men depict the results of straying from the straight and narrow path of Christianity (indicated by the church in the distance): the men are both physically and metaphorically blind-they have wandered onto a crooked path, symbolised by their unsteady motion from top left to bottom right of the picture plane– and they are slowly falling on top of each other into a ditch. Morimura's use of the parable and the painting is taken to dizzying heights. The blind peasants are replaced by a family of modern Japanese and each is weighed down by their own set of symbols. The painted background becomes a photographic reproduction coated with a transparent medium in order to simulate painting. The fallen father, blinded by his headband, is buried in 1000-yen notes.This most common denomination in Japanese currency has been altered by Morimura so that the face of the famous late nineteenth-century Anglophile writer Natsume Soseki becomes the artist's own. Morimura uses these remade notes in another 1991 work, Yen mountain, where the conflation of money, facial differentiation and shape (that of Mt Fuji's 68 I ART I s T s : EA s T A s I A perfect cone) results in a satirical comment about the meaning of buying identity. The father in Blinded by the light is dressed in both Western and Eastern clothes. His wife, who is about to topple onto him, wears fancy fake furs and frilly accoutrements. The elder sister follows on behind. Laden with designer shopping bags-one stamped with nuclear insignia, another with the label 'Morimura', and yet another, on which 'Tiffany' has been replaced by 'Tofunny'-she becomes the classic late 1980s high fashion victim. Draped in Chanel jewellery and accessories she lurches toward her fate. Next is the elder brother, a soldier blinded by his own hand grenades, using his rifle as a support. Behind the soldier is an artist dressed as a parody of a French impressionist painter, blinded by his paintbrushes. Last of all is a baby dressed to emulate the doll-like way in which Japanese parents tend to dress their small children. Blinded by the light is a savagely witty indictment of the Japanese lifestyle during the 'bubble economy' of the 1980s. The consumer madness which drove Japan during this decade-and further excluded history and tradition-can be seen in parallel with a not dissimilar period in the late nineteenth century after the Meiji Restoration and the opening of Japan to the West after centuries of isolation. This work comes from an exceptionally rich moment in Morimura's oeuvre when he employed numerous Western masterpieces as a base, including works by Cranach, Goya, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Rembrandt. Always using his own face and body, he escalated his analysis of both the Japanese fascination with the West, and Western exoticised notions of Japan as a highly aestheticised and refined environment. For all of their intellectual and technical finesse, Morimura's work frequently revels in unalloyed kitsch due to the collisions of icons, style, history, and differing representations of himself. This only serves to make the work more compelling to both the Eastern and the Western eye. It is the artist's chameleon-like ability in directing himself to pose as his own subject within familiar but decontextualised environments that results in a breathtaking layering of meaning, persistently resistant to being fully understood. Morimura moves rapidly through the issues of race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, location and out the other side; he remains the ringmaster, sidestepping neat categorisations which would lead to reading the work as being simply about one issue or another. Morimura is both critic and lover in everything he does in the sense that as fast as he deconstructs, he reassembles in order to present yet another multifaceted image of the self-in homage to the history of art and of ideas. Judy Annear,Senior Curator Photography,The Art Gallery ofNew South Wales, Sydney,Australia