I was worried that I, the artist Morimura, would have conflicts with the participating artists and develop a strenuous relationship with them. But the actual experience was completely the opposite. The artists accepted my requests rather positively, because it came from a fellow artist. I strongly feel that the fact that my being an artist avoided the usual curator vs artist tension, and led to creating a positive atmosphere as well as developing a solidarity amongst artists and building a community for artists.
Yasumasa MorimuraOf course, I, like the sponsoring government, would like to have as many people as possible visit Yokohama Triennale. This is because I believe that art should not be monopolized by professionals and specialists.
Yasumasa MorimuraI think it is important to be aware that the Internet has replaced the television, and has become a place where the uniformity of human society is accelerated.
Yasumasa MorimuraThe value of art is its ability to look into the "world of oblivion" and to find things that are generally unrecognized, forgotten, invisible and impossible to tell.
Yasumasa MorimuraI first wrote down all the phenomena that have emerged in contemporary society that I thought were related to this theme ["sea of oblivion"], and then sorted them out by grouping them into islands of ideas.
Yasumasa MorimuraEven Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci were entertainers. In that way, I am an entertainer and want to make art that is fun.
Yasumasa MorimuraTaking photographs is generally an act of 'looking at the object, whereas 'being seen' or 'showing' is what is most interest to one who does a self-portrait...self-portraits deny not only photography itself but the 20th century as an era as well...an inevitable phenomenon at the end of the 20th century.
Yasumasa Morimura