Osamu kanemura biography of george
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Part two of of my essay “Yutaka Takanashi – Towards the City” for the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris.
This is part two of of my essay “Yutaka Takanashi – Towards the City” for the “Yutaka Takanashi” exhibition catalogue, accompanying the show at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson.
[Part 1, part 3 and part 4]
The “Provoke” era
The economic upturn of the 1960s, which established Japan as the third-largest economic power on Earth, took its toll on Japanese society. Particularly in the major cities, the boom led to the decline of traditional structures which in turn left a feeling of uprooting and perspectivelessness among the younger generation.
Especially in the universities, a fundamental opposition developed against the new political, economic and cultural structures that had emerged in the post-war period. In 1968, the resistance manifested itself once again in student protests against the pending extension of the “ANPO” security pact and the Vietnam War.
The sense of alienation and rootlessness felt by the young generation found artistic expression above all in photography from the end of the 1960s.
This phase of the upheaval was documented by Shomei Tomatsu in his photo book Oo! Shinjuku. A resi
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Yasumasa Morimura (森村 泰昌, Morimura Yasumasa, born June 11, 1951) is a Japanese appropriation artist. He was born in Osaka and graduated from Kyoto City University of Arts in 1978. Since 1985, Morimura has primarily shown his work in international solo exhibitions, although he has been involved in various group exhibitions. Morimura borrows images from historical artists (ranging from Édouard Manet to Rembrandt to Cindy Sherman), and inserts his own face and body into them. He even disguises himself as the principal subjects that appear in the artworks he appropriated, many of which goes against his racial, ethnic, and gender boundaries as an Asian male because most of the artworks he appropriates have Western subjects, particularly female subjects. These include Mona Lisa, Frida Kahlo's self-portraits, and the characters in Velázquez's Las Meninas (1956). He also inserted himself into some of the Western male subjects, and the majority of those works mostly deal with race and ethnicity. Through the use of disguises, he overturns the effects of the male gaze, gender, race, ethnicity, and cultural standards, challenging the traditional methods of portraiture that he alters the original Western artworks by incorporating details related to Japanese culture. For example, in one of
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