“How can I make art when all the world is a conceptual artwork? What do you do then?” Simon Fujiwara is known for his complex and multilayered works spanning everything from the rebranding of a woman whose career was destroyed after her private photos were circulated in her workplace, to the origins of commercial culture via the last queen of France. His most recent project is a cartoon bear named Who, with an appetite for images and a quest for identity. Who is an extrapolation from an approach that runs throughout the artist’s body of work. An inveterate storyteller, Fujiwara exposes and unpicks issues of identity through near forensic investigations into images including literal likenesses, public personae, ideology, and myth.
The British-Japanese artist’s childhood was spent in St Ives, in southwest England. “I suppose one of the good things about growing up there was that it was so boring,” Fujiwara reflected. “It was very much a monoculture, very remote—and, of course, before the internet, so I spent a lot of time daydreaming and waiting for magazines I’d ordered on subscription to arrive. I think that’s why my interest in images started—because I was so starved of them.” Despite St Ives’ significant art credentials—famed for its superlative light, it has been a mecca for artists since the late 19th century, its legacy cemented by the launch of mega museum-brand Tate’s outpost there in 1993—it wasn’t the town’s offerings that inspired the teenage Fujiwara. “I mean, what’s a kid going to do with lots of abstract paintings and Barbara Hepworth sculptures?” he said. Rather, he looked to the YBAs, or Young British Artists. Widely dubbed the enfants terribles of the art world when they emerged in London in the 1990s, the YBAs were, for a time, just as likely to appear in British
