Hikaru Fujii

Hikaru Fujii (藤井光, Hikaru Fujii, b. 1976) is a contemporary Japanese artist who explores the relationship between art, history, and social activism. Of particular interest for him are the role and responsibility of museums and institutions as sites that preserve and perpetuate specific historical narratives.

Fujii has exhibited his work internationally, including Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (MOT); National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; 2019 Aichi Triennale, Nagoya; Sendai Mediatheque, Sendai; Aomori Contemporary Art Centre, Aomori; National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul (MMCA); Kadist, Paris; and the Onassis Cultural Centre, Athens, among others. He won the Grand Prix for the Nissan Art Award in 2017, and the Tokyo Contemporary Art Award in 2020, alongside Chikako Yamashiro. He lives and works in Tokyo.

Education and artistic approach Fujii was born in Tokyo in 1976. He spent 10 years outside of Japan, primarily living in Paris, France, where he acquired a diploma from the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, and then a Diplôme d'études approfondies (DEA) in Aesthetics, Sciences and Technology of the Arts from the University of Paris 8 in 2004. He regularly incorporates history and temporality into his work, and has stated that "in [his] artistic practice [he] always thinks about various notions of time."

While living in France, Fujii considered himself more of an "observer" of society, but upon returning to Japan he became more involved in society and possibilities of political resistance; the artist has admitted that his friends in France considered him to be a cultural anthropologist, and in Japan "[he] became an activist."

With his interest in history and historical narrative, Fujii's artwork often explores the position of museums and cultural institutions, education practices, and social systems in Japan and Asia, including racial divisions, war memory, and colonial legacies. He is interested in the role, responsibility, and power of museums as places that preserve history and perpetuate specific narratives and biases. The former Keiko Kan had been responsible for the collection and preservation of Ainu archival materials, folk crafts and objects from the Aomori and Ezo regions before it was forced to close in early 2006 due to financial difficulties. The "Aomori City Archives Exhibition" was held annually by the ACAC from 2013-2017, inviting contemporary artists to curate the Keiko Kan's collection with a new perspective. Playing Japanese shared multi-channel footage from a two-day public workshop that Fujii organized about preconceived notions of "Japanese-ness," in which members of the public were invited to "perform" what they felt it meant to be Japanese, reenacting historical texts about the1903 Osaka Expo's human exhibit, and acting as Japanese people examining the differences and commonalities of people's perceptions towards the indigenous populations included in the exhibition. The work highlights the violent history of anthropology as a discipline that was once used to build up Japan's national identity and imperialist vision. Fujii stated his hope that through this work, people can “examine carefully the ways we are the same as people in the past, and the ways that we are different.” During the residency he prepared The Primary Fact (2018), which had been originally commission and produced for the 2018 Onassis Fast Forward Festival in Athens, Greece. Fujii also exhibited The Primary Fact at ISCP as part of his residency, cumulating in his first solo exhibition in the United States. The title of the piece refers to how the artefacts uncovered during the excavation evidence the "primary fact" or their execution, but with no context or detail as to how or why it came about. He immediately started listening to the stories of artists and cultural practitioners who had experienced the Kobe earthquake in 1995, before traveling to the afflicted Tōhoku region only three weeks after the earthquake to document the aftermath.

Fujii also created a 12-min short film called Recording of a Coastal Landscape (2012), an unembellished recording of a sunrise unfolding along the coast in the small town of Iitate. The film proceeds with no camera movement or added sound throughout, concluding with a small white text that designates the town's coordinates and radiation level, indicating the ominous new set of data that will forever be inscribed upon this region due to the nuclear disaster. Fujii produced the resulting film, entitled Project Fukushima!, over the course of seven months, focusing on the music and arts of the festival as well as the attitudes of participants and the ethical questions and conflicts faced by the organizers. Asahiza had originally opened in 1923, the same year of the Great Kantō Earthquake, and had been an important cultural center for the city before eventually declining into disrepair as the city's population fell.

For this film, Fujii first documented interviews with locals from the quiet town of Minamisōma reminiscing about Asahiza and its impact on the area, then recorded a group of visitors from the urban capital of Tokyo coming to Minamisōma and watching the half-finished film in the Asahiza theatre. Due to the nuclear radiation, the contents of the Futaba Town Museum of History and Folklore were removed from the area and stored in a different location, and it was unknown if the objects would ever be returned to the area or if another institution would be given responsibility for preserving them.

Awards

2017 Nissan Art Award, Grand Prix 2020 Tokyo Contemporary Art Award