Simon Fujiwara


Simon Fujiwara is a British/Japanese artist.
His works range from paintings and photographs to installations, film and sculptures. They are shown all around the world, for example in the Tate Modern in London, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin and the Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery.
In 2016 Simon Fujiwara showed shaved furs of animals in Tokyo, a multimedial biography of the Irish "traitor" Roger Casement in Dublin and the skin pigments of the German chancellor Angela Merkel, magnified by the factor of 1,000, in Berlin. In Bregenz he built a replica of the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam.
Fujiwara sees his art as a mixture of politics, architecture and his own biography. In the Tate St. Ives for example he reconstructed the bar of a hotel his parents ran in Spain when Simon was little. He charged the scene with erotic elements.
, at the University of Leeds |thumb| right

Life

Simon Fujiwara was born in the London suburb of Harrow. His family moved to Japan, later to Spain and finally to Cornwall, where Simon discovered his sense for art. He studied architecture at the University of Cambridge and, from 2005 until 2008, art at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. He lives in Berlin.

Selected Exhibitions and Reviews

Fujiwara's works have been widely exhibited around the world both in solo and group exhibitions.
'The museum of incest' is among his earliest performance-based works to be selected for individual display marking the beginning of his career as an artist. Originally performed in 2008 at the Limoncello Gallery in London, 'the museum of incest' was replicated in several occasions and contexts throughout the years. A printed guide has been published by Archive Books to accompany later versions of the installation.
In 2008, jointly with architect Sam Causer, Fujiwara conceived 'the closet gallery', a site-specific installation launched as part of the London Festival of Architecture and supported by the Architecture Foundation. His residency at the Los Angeles' MAK Centre for Contemporary Art culminated in 2009 with 'Impersonator', a performance investigating the cult of Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Between October 2008 and March 2009, Fujiwara was a MAK Center's artist-in-residence at the Schindler House in Los Angeles. In 2009 was awarded the Arts Foundation Fellowship Award for Interior Architecture. The site-specific installation 'frozen' earned him the Cartier Award 2010 for emerging artists. The same year was awarded the Iaspis Residency in Gothenburg, and simultaneously with 'welcome to the Hotel Munberwon', installation on view at Art Statements, won the Baloise Art Prize. In 2011 was nominated for the South Bank Award for the visual art category.