Description
Simon Fujiwara’s Untitled (Who Puzzle) are three unique puzzle works in lasercut foam core on board from a series titled “Who the Baer,” currently on view at the Fondazione Prada, about a cartoon bear named Who, who is fighting for an identity beyond the accumulation of images of self.
Simon Fujiwara (b. 1982, London) is a British-Japanese Berlin-based artist whose work offers a unique view into the mechanics of identity construction and the ‘industry of the individual’ in contemporary life. His works emerge from a personal grappling with the contradictions of inherited racial, national, historical, cultural values. In his most ambitious projects that range from a full reconstruction of the Anne Frank House (Hope House, 2016-8) to the “re-branding campaign” for his former high school art teacher after a nude media scandal (Joanne, 2016), Fujiwara deftly navigates culturally potent topics with enigmatic and surprising approaches that broaden conversations and avoid didacticism. Through his multiple formal strategies, Fujiwara is able to use the tools of our hyper-mediated world – from advertising, museum making to theme park design – to hold a distorted mirror to our contemporary, liberal societies possessed with spectacle, fantasy and authenticity. A graduate of Cambridge and Städelschule, Fujiwara has had recent solo exhibitions at Kunstinstituut Melly, Fondazione Prada, the Blaffer Art Museum and Esther Schipper, Berlin. His work was also included in the Venice Biennale (2009), São Paulo Biennial (2010), Gwangju Biennial (2012), Shanghai Biennial (2012), and Sharjah Biennial (2013).
