and object” in his Playing with Gods (Night) (1991). From 1994 to 1996, Morimura produced his Actress series in which he portrays mid-20th Century American and European actresses and film characters situated in Japanese locales. In Self-Portrait – Actress After Jodie Foster 2 (1996), Morimura fashions himself after Jodie Foster's prostitute character from Taxi Driver (1976) while seated on a red stool in an urban Tokyo alleyway littered with packets of cigarettes. However, Morimura did not only restrict his Actress subjects to still photography as he breathed life into his roles through both live performance and a short film. In 1995, Morimura had a video recorded in which the camera shows the massive Yasuda Auditorium classroom at Tokyo University's Komaba campus as students sit at their desks and prepare for their professor's lecture. Unbeknownst to them, Morimura arrives dressed as Marilyn Monroe (who he refers to as “Actress M”) and proceeds to run around shouting and gesticulating before standing atop a desk at the front of the room. Morimura strikes a pose that mimics Monroe's famous performance in The Seven Year Itch (1955). Although he was in character as a white, female American actress, the performance was both a reference to and an indirect recreation of the right-wing writer Yukio Mishima's infamous debate with the left-wing student group Zenkyōtō that occurred in the same auditorium on May 13, 1969. While Morimura admitted he did not research the event in great detail, he has continually referenced how Mishima's theatrically expressive opposition to the “cultural castration” and consumerism of Japan moved him to consider the importance of art's authenticity in a Japanese context. As a commentary on Mishima's vehement opposition to the perceived feminization of Japan in the Post-World War II era, Morimura decided to reinterpret the event from the polar opposite standpoint of a recognizably female subject and symbol of popular media consumption, Marilyn Monroe. In preparation for the Yokohama Museum of Art's exhibition The Sickness Unto Beauty – Self-portrait as Actress (April 1996 – June 1996), Morimura was commissioned to appear in a short film as part of the show's focus on his recent Actress series. The experimental filmmaker Takashi Itoh directed Apparatus M (1996) that features Morimura as Marilyn Monroe. The film was screened in a classic-style theater venue contained within the museum's exhibition space to evoke the connections between Monroe and the filmgoing culture of the Golden Age