Born 1951, Osaka, Japan
Lives and works in Osaka

Since the 1980s Morimura Yasumasa has been known for his transgressive self-portraits identifying with art-historical images, famous film actresses and iconic twentieth-century figures. White darkness 1994 (printed 2008), part of his 'Rembrandt Room' group of works, is an unsettling and powerful image, showing Morimura next to a flayed bovine carcass, naked apart from an incongruous pair of high-heeled shoes and a Renaissance-style beret. The work refers most explicitly to the Boeuf écorché tradition in art, a visceral crucifixion metaphor with origins in the parable of the prodigal son, and with a lineage extending from Rembrandt, to Francis Bacon, to Damien Hirst. Through a series of subtle subversions and allusions, Morimura's multi-layered image confronts notions of a fixed national, cultural and sexual expression, standing as a metaphor for a number of important narrative threads running through APT8.