The Death of Painting and Its Afterlife in Morimura Yasumasa’s Portrait (Futago)

This essay performs a close reading of Morimura’s Portrait (Futago) to establish how the artist’s multi-media approach echoes 1980s declarations about the end of painting while also proposing alternatives for its historical and material afterlife. In many ways, the artist’s performances make the crises brought on by the emerging global economy visual, and as such pointed to a number of slow deaths: of painting, of capitalism, of Japanese tradition. But the images do not merely document the demise. Instead, they present a scenario in which multiplicities define contemporary being. By considering how the work engages with photography, performance, and painting, I argue that Morimura’s approach to modality pointed out inherently Western assumptions about painting as well as its incompatibility with a holistic global identity in the 1980s and 90s. Exploiting the stereotypes of his media, Morimura makes tangible painting’s complicity with Western hegemony and destabilizes it in ways that propose a new global subject.