M Holding a Cigarette

For more than 20 years, Yasumasa Morimura has presented himself in the guise of female cultural icons, re-creating their most famous portraits. His photographs do not present a seamless disguise of man as woman, artist as icon, or Japanese as Westerner. Instead, the makeup remains an obvious mask, as it does for female impersonators in Japanese Kabuki theater. Instant color photographs serve Morimura as tests for larger finished works or give him a way to adopt guises he has not pursued elsewhere. Intimate in size and self-developing, these pictures act as a kind of photographic sketchbook that allows the artist to consider adjustments to his costume, stance, pose, gaze, and gesture. M Holding a Cigarette casually reveals the edges of the rolled black backdrop as well as the metal structure supporting it, playfully showing the limits of the facade.