Simon Fujiwara, Hello Who?

Who are you? It is perhaps the simplest question imaginable and yet one that has become increasingly difficult to answer. In an age of infinite self-presentation, where identities are constructed, performed, consumed and circulated across digital networks with unprecedented speed, the search for an authentic self has become both a personal pursuit and a cultural obsession.

For Hello Who?, Simon Fujiwara introduces audiences around the world to Who the Bær, a cartoon protagonist engaged in an endless search for meaning, belonging and self-definition. Appearing each evening across CIRCA’s global network of public screens, Who drifts through a sequence of questions that are at once playful, philosophical and unexpectedly profound. Who wrote history? Who wants love eternally? Who will stop the awful greed? Who needs a goddamn nap?

These questions arrive without answers. Instead, they accumulate, forming a portrait not of certainty but of perpetual becoming.

Conceived during the first COVID-19 lockdown, when physical life retreated behind screens and human experience was increasingly flattened into content, Who the Bær emerged as Fujiwara’s response to a world saturated by images. Neither fully character nor symbol, neither person nor brand, Who exists within a strange contemporary condition. They possess no fixed race, gender, nationality or sexuality. They arrive without biography, history or origin story. In a culture increasingly organised around categories of identification, Who remains radically undefined.

Yet this absence is precisely what allows the figure to become so resonant.

Throughout his practice, Fujiwara has examined the mechanisms through which identities are constructed and consumed. Whether exploring tourism, celebrity, nationalism, memory or authenticity, his work consistently reveals how contemporary culture transforms lived experience into representation. In Who the Bær, this inquiry reaches perhaps its purest form. Here, identity itself becomes detached from the body and transformed into image.

The result is a character who inhabits a curious paradox. Who searches constantly for an authentic self while existing entirely within the realm of representation. They are an image seeking identity within a world composed of images.

This dilemma feels uniquely contemporary. Today, the question of who we are is increasingly mediated through photographs, profiles, data, brands and algorithms. We encounter ourselves reflected through screens before we encounter ourselves directly. Visibility becomes a form of existence. Recognition becomes a form of value. Identity becomes something simultaneously expressed and produced through images.

Fujiwara approaches these conditions neither with cynicism nor nostalgia. Instead, he employs humour, absurdity and play. Drawing upon traditions of Dada, animation, popular culture and conceptual art, Who the Bær navigates contemporary life with a mixture of innocence and bewilderment. Their journey oscillates between joy and melancholy, euphoria and loneliness, comedy and existential uncertainty.

The stop-motion animation format reinforces this sense of instability. Built frame by frame through continual transformation, the medium mirrors the fluidity of identity itself. Nothing remains fixed. Every image becomes another image. Every answer generates a new question. Every attempt at self-definition dissolves into further possibility.

If the twentieth century was defined by the search for authenticity, the twenty-first increasingly appears characterised by uncertainty about whether such authenticity can ever be located at all. Fujiwara does not attempt to resolve this tension. Instead, Hello Who? inhabits it.

Presented across some of the world’s most prominent advertising screens, the work performs a subtle inversion. Spaces ordinarily dedicated to selling identities, lifestyles and aspirations become occupied by a figure who possesses none of these things. Interrupting the relentless circulation of commercial imagery, Who offers no product, no solution and no certainty. Instead, they offer questions.

In doing so, Hello Who? transforms the public screen into a site of reflection rather than persuasion. The commission asks what it means to remain human within an increasingly image-driven culture, and whether identity might be understood not as something discovered or possessed, but as something continually negotiated, performed and imagined.

As Who the Bær wanders across London’s Piccadilly Lights and throughout CIRCA’s global network, they become less a character than a companion for our contemporary condition: uncertain, curious, contradictory and unfinished.

Simon Fujiwara is one of the most distinctive artists of his generation, renowned for a practice that examines how identity is constructed, performed and consumed in contemporary culture. Working across installation, sculpture, film, performance and drawing, he creates works that combine humour, fiction and autobiography to explore the systems through which personal and collective identities are shaped.

Born in London to a Japanese father and British mother, Fujiwara’s work frequently navigates the intersections of history, memory, sexuality, politics and popular culture. Over the past decade, he has become known for ambitious projects that interrogate how narratives are created and circulated, often focusing on subjects that sit at the intersection of personal experience and broader cultural mythologies. Whether reconstructing historical sites, reimagining public figures or creating entirely new fictional worlds, his work consistently questions the mechanisms through which meaning and identity are produced.

In 2022, Fujiwara collaborated with CIRCA on Hello Who?, a major public commission introducing Who the Bær to audiences across London, Berlin, Los Angeles, Melbourne, Milan, New York and Seoul. Originally developed during the first COVID-19 lockdown, Who the Bær is a “cartoon character as conceptual artwork”, a figure without fixed race, gender or sexuality who searches for an authentic self in a world dominated by images. Through stop-motion animation, humour and philosophical inquiry, Hello Who? transformed public screens into platforms for reflection on belonging, representation and the complexities of identity in the digital age. Accompanied by a series of editions published by CIRCA, the project marked the first time Who the Bær entered public space on a global scale.

Fujiwara’s work has been exhibited internationally at institutions including Fondazione Prada, Kunsthaus Bregenz, Lafayette Anticipations, the Museum of Modern Art, Tate, Centre Pompidou and the Guggenheim Museum. Through a practice that is at once playful and deeply critical, he continues to reveal how contemporary society constructs meaning, encouraging audiences to question the stories, images and assumptions that shape how we understand ourselves and others.