Simon Fujiwara

Tate St Ives presents the first major exhibition in the UK of the work of Simon Fujiwara (b.1982), a young British/Japanese artist who has been building a strong reputation over the last few years with a string of acclaimed projects around the world.

Fujiwara moved to Carbis Bay, a mile from St Ives, when he was four years old, living there with his mother until he was sixteen. Much of Fujiwara’s work is deeply autobiographical, mixing fact and fiction to create intricate installations and performances which draw on his family history. Through novels, theatre plays, lectures and installations, he scripts and performs his biography as fiction – an ongoing drama in which he plays the roles of artist, novelist, anthropologist, eroticist, architect and playwright, fusing the personal with universal socio-political and historical themes.

The show at Tate St Ives presents five commissioned works and two of Fujiwara’s major works completed over the last three years, creating a series of ‘rooms’ which he has described as resembling ‘a walk through the stage-set interiors of a National Trust mansion’. Most of the new works are based on his childhood in Cornwall, his relationship with his absent Japanese father, and his formative encounters with art and artists in the town. In this way the show brings his projects together in the unique context to which they refer. In addition, Fujiwara integrates key works from the Tate collection into the exhibition – including paintings by Francis Bacon, Patrick Heron and Alfred Wallis and sculptures by Barbara Hepworth – in an innovative display that mixes them with his own works.

The exhibition includes important works such as The Mirror Stage 2009–11, previously presented as a performance and recreated now as an installation. This piece is an exploration of his adolescent encounter with a Patrick Heron painting at the opening of Tate St Ives in 1993. Another significant work on view is Welcome to the Hotel Munber 2008–10, the set for a fictitious erotic novel taking place in the Spanish hotel bar his parents ran during Franco’s dictatorial regime. The exhibition also consists of a number of new works including Saint Simon, the Reincarnation of Judas 2012, an effigy of a South American folklore saint whose face has been replaced by that of the artist; Rehearsal for a Reunion (with the Father of Pottery) 2011, a revisiting of the legacy of Bernard Leach made in a collaboration with his father; and Mothers of Invention 2012, a Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein inspired set that combines works by female artists that have influenced Fujiwara’s practice with his own sculptural representations of two of his former teachers and Barbara Hepworth.

Simon Fujiwara