The UK artist Simon Fujiwara has taken on Pablo Picasso’s anti-war masterpiece Guernica (1937) in a work forming part of a survey of two decades of his career at the Mudam Luxembourg (Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean), one of Europe’s pre-eminent contemporary art institutions (A Whole New World, 20 March-23 August). The vast painting shows Fujiwara’s trademark cartoon character, Who the Baer, submerged in a mass of bodies, bombs and drones against the backdrop of conflict today.
In the show Fujiwara, who is known for his provocative and probing practice, also describes his experience of contracting syphilis while another installation commemorates the Japanese gay porn star Koh Masaki who died in 2013 aged 29.
The Guernica interpretation, the third featuring Who the Baer, greets visitors. “This depicts Guernica after the battle. The figures are no longer fighting. They’re in a giant pile. They’re exhausted and there’s a sunrise on a new day behind them. The title of the work is A Whole New World (for Who?). It’s asking what’s going to happen after the conflicts that we have. Who’s going to be taken into that new world?” he says.
Who the Baer is Fujiwara’s filter on the world. “I was trying to look at the idea of what happens after Duchamp, Warhol and Sturtevant—where you get to the point where conceptualism becomes almost like copying an artwork. Where do you go next when you’re looking at that idea of hyper-referentiality? And with who? It became this character that I could put all these concepts in, [embodying] them as a kind of lovable cutesy figure which is how we need to consume things,” he says.
The exhibition is divided up into a theme park with different zones. “I looked at the plan of Mudam and I noticed that it looked like a theme park. So I thought—I can create different lands in different rooms,” Fujiwara says. “My projects are like a weird distorted Disneyland… The themes of today—they’re porn, disease, pandemics, and we’re in a world of massive themes—and this is the park that connects them in a way.”
In the works that reference syphilis, Syphilis: A Conquest (2020-23), Fujiwara puts his spin on an ancient disease still considered taboo.
“The most incredible writers and artists have had it. So I wanted to make work that was a celebration rather than hiding [it], trying to show the disease as exuberant, almost like a badge of honour, as if it connected me to a lineage. I made a lot of these works when I was recovering and had really crazy fever dreams.” The pieces featured include four busts of Francisco de Goya, Henri de Toulouse Lautrec, Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, fellow sufferers Fujiwara calls his “syphilitic comrades”.
Another key piece, Joanne (2016-18), a mixed-media work, highlights Joanne Salley, a former Miss Northern Ireland, artist and TV presenter who was, said Fujiwara, “an inspirational figure” when she taught him at Harrow School in Middlesex, London, in 2000. She made headlines in 2011 when pupils distributed private topless photographs of her taken by a female photography teacher and left on a memory stick in a school studio.
Likeness (2018), another influential work, is a wax version of Anne Frank which aims to demythologise the young Jewish diarist killed by the Nazis.
The section on Koh Masaki, The Way (2015-26), is a poignant finale to the show. “I saw this post of Koh Masaki’s boyfriend feeding him in hospital, and it’s the last image of him. This is so much more intimate than any porn. Porn is showing you an incredibly intimate act, but it’s turned into something incredibly unintimate. This image makes me realise this person’s a human; you can consume images of porn stars or whatever and they’re dehumanised in a sense.” A sequence of images capture Masaki’s final ejaculation on film.
So what is Fujiwara trying to achieve after 20 years? A press statement says that the artist is asking: “How should one construct a self today?”
Fujiwara tells The Art Newspaper: “The biggest question is what is reality but that’s what all artists have struggled with so it’s not a new project. Caravaggio tried to do it with lighting, people and bodies and Cézanne tried to do it with an apple and I’m saying, ‘We’re in this reality where we’re dealing with digital media and many versions of reality.’ I think we’re trying to all grasp what the real is at the moment.”
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