Yasumasa Morimura (森村 泰昌, Morimura Yasumasa, born June 11, 1951) is a contemporary Japanese performance and appropriation artist whose work encompasses photography, film, and live performance. He is known for his reinterpretation of recognizable artworks and figures from art history, history, and mass media through his adoption of personas that transcend national, ethnic, gendered, and racial boundaries. Across his photographic and performative series, Morimura's works explore a number of interconnected themes, including: the nature of identity and its ability to undergo change, postcolonialism, authorship, and the Western view of Japan – and Asia, more broadly – as feminine. Originally intent on channeling his creative energy into black-and-white still life photography, Morimura struggled to ascertain his identity and decided to visualize this inner struggle through self-portraiture. In 1985, Portrait (Van Gogh), marked the first of dozens of self-portraits Morimura completed in which he adopted the role of established artists, major historical figures, celebrated popular culture icons, and identifiable subjects from well-known artworks. Since the 1980s, Morimura's artistic process entails a rigorous system in which he transforms his entire body into a nearly identical replica of his designated subject through elaborate costumes, makeup, props, and set designs. Once digital photography and computer editing software became more accessible and refined in the late-1990s, Morimura's works demonstrate greater visual complexity in his manipulation of composition, lighting, and the number of figures he portrays within a single artwork. For the last two and a half decades, Morimura has brought his personas to life in short video, film, and live performances in which he expresses their thoughts through movement and scripted monologues. Early life and education (1951–1978) Yasumasa Morimura was born in Osaka, Japan in 1951 to father Nobuo (died in 2006) and mother Hiroko (died in 2016). Following the end of the American Occupation of Japan in 1952, Morimura grew up in a generation that embraced Western values and cultural trends that came to define Japan's Post-World War II period. His continual exposure to Western, particularly American, socio-cultural customs in music, film, and fashion would later influence his artistic pursuits in the 1980s. In the mid-1970s, Morimura enrolled in the Kyoto City University of Art, where he received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1978. During his studies, an early interest in photography emerged after he took a course taught by Life magazine photographer Y. Ernest Satow (1927–1990). Satow lectured on the Modern Western aesthetic