Simon Fujiwara
A Whole New Who? (Bedtime Reading)
2022
€1795,00
Digital Fine Art print with hand-finished ink in artist frame
39,5 x 59,5 cm
Edition of 25 copies, signed and numbered by the artist
In stock
about this work
This edition is based on Simon Fujiwara’s extensive body of works centred around his creation of an original cartoon character, Who the Bær. Fujiwara began drawing and collaging versions of his bear during the first 2020 lockdown in Berlin, developing the concept of a contemporary subject that exists as a ‘total image searching for a self in the world of images’.
Who the Bær since developed into a large-scale project manifesting in drawings, collages, sculptures, animations and animatronics. Taking a cartoon subject as a simplified lens to look at image culture, Fujiwara’s absurdist creations reflect on the complex mechanisms of defining a self in an image-dominated world.
For this limited edition, the artist returned to the origins of his project presenting an artwork that shows the way the artist uses Who as a cartoon avatar through which to explore the pleasures and traumas, violence and joys of life in the mediated modern world.
about Simon Fujiwara
The work of British-Japanese Simon Fujiwara 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, and cultural values. His most ambitious projects range from a full reconstruction of the Anne Frank House (Hope House, 2016–18) 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, and museum making to theme park design—to hold a distorted mirror to our contemporary, liberal societies possessed with spectacle, fantasy and authenticity.
(courtesy of Esther Schipper)
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