Simon Fujiwara's Who the Bær Is Coming To A Billboard Near You
We just dropped a collaborative Who the Bær? collection with Simon Fujiwara. See the full release here.
British-Japanese artist Simon Fujiwara has come together with digital art and culture platform CIRCA to bring his art from the walls of museums to the most famous billboards around the world.
Throughout the month of April, viewers will be able to follow Who the Bær, a cartoon protagonist by Fujiwara, as he pops up in prominent spaces across various cities.
First imagined during lockdown, Who was created by the artist as a reaction to the shortcomings of the modern world. In an interview with Highsnobiety, he said that “we're born into a world where everything is trash; that meaning has been turned only into marketing.”
Beginning as a simple doodle, Who has gone on to become "a dada-esque response to our increasingly extreme and incomprehensible times. With no identity - no race, gender or sexuality - I wanted Who to help create a language to play with complex ideas and even taboos in our era of identity politics," according to a statement by the artist.
Cutting through the digital world of mass consumption, the figure has found itself incorporated into Fujiwara's work in the form of drawings, sculptures, animations, and collages. However, its latest presentation will be the most visible yet.
Showing up on billboards around the world, from Times Square in New York to the Coex K-Pop Square in Seoul, the cartoon figure will be interrupting the usual programming of adverts to present its quest for identity and belonging.
In a statement, the artist said that "Who the Bær is just an image seeking an identity in the world of images, and so presenting them globally on the large screens of the CIRCA platform feels like a perfect way to bring Who the Bær out of the museums and into the public space for the first time.”
In order to fund this free display of art, Simon Fujiwara has also created two new artworks (shown above) available exclusively through CIRCA.ART. These are hand-signed silkscreen prints limited to 22 editions and time-limited edition prints, available until midnight 30th April 2022.
To see if Who the Bær is coming to a city near you, check out the places they will be shown below. Who will be broadcast every day at 20:22 throughout the month in these locations. Also, head over to the Highsnobiety Shop to check out our collection with the artist.
Berlin — Limes, Kurfürstendamm
London — Piccadilly Lights
Los Angeles — Pendry West Hollywood
Melbourne — Fed Square
Milan — Luxottica, Piazzale Cadorna
New York — Luxottica, Times Square
Seoul — Coex K-Pop Square
Online — CIRCA.ART
