Despite a few cardboard boxes, brimming bookshelves and sprawling spatial models, there’s a surprising openness to Simon Fujiwara’s studio, located in a trendy – if dilapidated – corner of Kreuzberg, Berlin. ‘It’s because everything has just left – it’s all on the way to Mudam,’ he says, clearly finding it difficult to adjust to having nothing to do. His new, mid-career survey, A Whole New World, which opened earlier this month, is his biggest exhibition to date, and he has been preparing for it for over two years. ‘I’ve had to be strict,’ he admits. ‘I always want to make something new.’

For the British-Japanese artist, restraint has never come easily. Since graduating from the Städelschule in Frankfurt in 2008, Fujiwara has worked at a staggering pace, often producing several major projects a year. But the pandemic, followed by the death of his father in 2024, forced a slowdown. ‘So much of my work asks what is constructed,’ he says. ‘I’ve complicated reality for years. But when something actually real happens – a death – it confronts you differently.’ The scale of the survey at Mudam Luxembourg, spread over 2,000 square meters, has prompted a recalibration. ‘I’m asking myself,’ he says, ‘how much of this work makes me real?’

The question runs through much of Fujiwara’s practice, where identity – his own and that of others – is less revealed than staged and challenged, elbowing for space in a world saturated with manufactured characters and surfaces. What emerges is a persona at once confident and exposed, caught between the desire for authenticity and the suspicion that identity itself may already be a performance.

Born in Harrow, northwest London, Fujiwara moved to Berlin in the mid-2000s, where his work began shifting away from autobiography toward the lives of others. In 2016 he made Joanne, a video portrait of his former art teacher at high school, who had resigned after topless images of her were discovered on a USB stick and circulated by students at the school. Five years later, Fujiwara persuaded her to collaborate on a film using the tools of marketing and PR to reclaim her story. ‘Everyone is becoming a brand,’ he reflects. ‘But that work was about turning her brand back into a person.’ Mixing glossy photoshoot footage with scrappy iPhone testimonials, the film reframed the scandal into a modern narrative of empowerment.

At times, Fujiwara’s work appears disarmingly simple, only gradually revealing the dense scaffolding of social critique beneath it. His cartoon bear, Who the Bær (2021–present), is a two-dimensional, endlessly curious invention, meandering through fairy tales, fantasy literature, and great canonical works of art. It functions like an ‘avatar,’ Fujiwara says of his genderless, identityless creation, which emerged from an anxiety about how to be oneself. ‘It feels very unfree to be yourself now. There’s pressure to be authentic, to match identity to work. I wondered whether it was even possible to make something about what we share.’ His answer – a shapeshifting, undeniably cute bear – plays up to its own appeal and has become one of the most recognizable figures in Fujiwara’s oeuvre.

His ongoing work focusing on Anne Frank, on the other hand, tackles a figure who has become one of the most widely recognized symbols of innocence in the 20th century. Fujiwara has returned to her repeatedly, unsettled by the cultural machinery that has turned her into an endlessly reproduced global commodity. ‘The way she’s been treated feels unjust,’ he says. ‘You go to Madame Tussauds [in London]. You walk past Liza Minnelli or Hitler in his bunker, then you open Anne Frank’s door and there are Gestapo footsteps,’ he adds, tapping the table in imitation. ‘We’re so completely immune to her now – she’sbecome unreal. No one ever really saw her. Now she’s everywhere.’ In the installation Hope House (2017), a waxwork of Frank sits at her desk, looking out with an innocent though faintly deranged smile while a robotic camera relentlessly circles her face.

Standing on a bookshelf in the middle of his studio, Fujiwara pulls out a small ‘build your own’ model of the Anne Frank House. For the exhibition he has enlarged several of its small cardboard components into full-scale structures. In 2018, at Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria, he rebuilt sections of the house, one level on each floor. ‘People think she lived in the attic – it’s a better story, but that’s actually where they grew potatoes,’ he says, before adding: ‘The way she’s been turned into something almost non-human – that’s happening to us too. That same machinery now operates on us.’

The performative nature of contemporary life, he suggests, now extends beyond people to the spaces we inhabit. ‘Places know they’re being experienced,’ he says. ‘Paris starts to look like Emily in Paris. People arrive and dress like Parisians for the week. Everywhere is becoming like this.’ This is one of the reasons his exhibition at Mudam has been organized around the idea of a theme park – a controlled universe where unpleasant realities, and the systems that keep the park running, remain hidden. ‘There’s an underground world of garbage and costume changes,’ he says. ‘Then themed lands and extreme excitement. Rides with two-hour waits. Theme-park life is becoming more and more like life.’

The title of the new show, A Whole New World, is taken from a well-known song that was part of the soundtrack for the Disney film Aladdin – at school, Fujiwara once played the Genie (‘I was always made to play ethnic-minority roles,’ he recalls wryly). The title sets the whole tone for the exhibition, where the works grapple with a world the artist sees as on the verge of profound change. ‘All the work in the show is about this brave new world that’s coming,’ he explains, ‘but I wanted to give it a glow of optimism. It’s very colorful and embracing. I hope it’s pleasurable, that’s the simple main thing.’

On the wall behind him is a mock-up of arrow-shaped signs that will guide visitors through the exhibition: ‘Who the Bær’ and ‘Syphilis’ (a series he produced after contracting the disease in 2019). ‘What’s interesting about theme parks is that they’re all about reassurance,’ he says with increasing enthusiasm. ‘You always know where you are. You’re always in the right place. There’s no thinking – just move your body through it.’ Then, with characteristic expansiveness, he begins to wonder whether the form itself might be used to produce a sense of collectivity. ‘Disneyland does it through nostalgic values – princesses, towers. But what if the stories were better? Could that temporarily create a shared reality?’ He pauses, pulling the idea back towards his own exhibition. ‘I’m not saying I’m achieving it. But it’s a form that could do that.’