Simon Fujiwara

(British, born 1982)

Simon Fujiwara is a contemporary British artist whose multimedia installations delve into personal recollections, politics, and architecture. Employing painting, photography, and sculpture, Fujiwara crafts scenes of a porn-filled hotel in 1970s Fascist Spain or a reunion with his estranged father. “My ambition for a work is its believability,” he has explained. “My work has been a lot about academia, freeing myself from it while making things look very researched, historical, but the root is to ask what the hell is the point, is any of it true or not, is it all fabricated? It comes from deep boredom with the status quo—including my own life.” Born in 1982 in London, United Kingdom to a British mother and Japanese father, he grew up in St. Ives without his father who moved back to Japan. A classically trained pianist, he struggled with his sexually identity in his youth, turning to art as a means to understand himself as a young man. The artist received his BA in architecture from Cambridge University in 2005 and his MFA from the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main in 2008. Fujiwara currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Today, his works are held in the collections of the Tate Gallery in London, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Center Georges Pompidou, among others.