Simon Fujiwara: A Whole New World

Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean presents Simon Fujiwara: A Whole New World, an exhibition spanning nearly twenty years of work by the Japanese-British artist Simon Fujiwara (1982, London). Conceived as a survey of his multifaceted practice, the exhibition transforms Mudam into an immersive environment inspired by the scenography and dramaturgy of theme parks.

“I’m often asked if my work is a critique of capitalism and modern society but my work is actually about feeling. I try to absorb what it feels to be alive today and translate that feeling into a visual language.”—Simon Fujiwara, May 2022

Fujiwara titled his mid-career survey A Whole New World—a phrase that also appears in the musical Aladdin, in which he once played the title role at school. In that story, the protagonist soars across a series of fantastical landscapes on a magic carpet. Echoing the idea of collapsing space and time into a stream of wondrous experiences, the exhibition brings together Fujiwara’s works into a series of his own “worlds of wonder.” The worlds unfold across the museum, guiding visitors through themed environments that aim to enchant even as they unsettle. 

Though A Whole New World adopts the logic of a theme park, its “attractions” confront pressing concerns of our time—from identity in an age of self-commodification to the immersive entertainment reality of a media-dominated world. With incisive wit, Fujiwara’s work searches for moments of humanity and even delight amid the pervasive currents of advertising, entertainment and online culture that mould and represent our identities and bodies.

The exhibition welcomes visitors into the colourful world of Who the Bær (2020–ongoing), Fujiwara’s cartoon character and theme-park-style mascot. With no fixed identity—no race, gender, sexuality or nationality—“Who” is in perpetual search of an image of a true self—a playful critique of our cultural obsession with authenticity in an era of cultural flattening and social media.

Elsewhere, key works such as Joanne (2016), Fabulous Beasts (2015–2016) and The Mirror Stage (2009–2013) explore the struggles of the contemporary individual within the “hall of mirrors” of today’s media landscape—a distorted funhouse where the self is endlessly reflected in products and images that promise liberation but may ultimately entrap us.

In Syphilis: A Conquest (2020), visitors enter a hallucinatory postcolonial fantasy based on the artist’s own experience of suffering from a historically emblematic, sexually transmitted disease. Works such as The Way (2016) and Fifty Shades Archive (2019) extend this exploration to the contemporary world of fantasy, confronting the commodification and spectacularisation of sexuality and desire in mass media and pornography.

In Hope House (2017–2020) Fujiwara explores uneasy questions around the commodification of historical trauma through mass-tourism experiences in a single case study—the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. After purchasing a 1:60 scale cardboard model of the house while visiting the museum shop, Fujiwara began reconstructing the history of Anne Frank’s ascent from diarist and Holocaust victim to global icon of hope and remembrance.

Seductive and disconcerting, A Whole New World traces the evolution of Fujiwara’s complex visual language and affirms art’s capacity to question, unsettle and invite dialogue. It ultimately offers a reflection on the power of images to shape our shared imagination as we move through an ever-changing world.

Curators: Léon Kruijswijk, assisted by Nicole Wittmann