Hikaru Fujii

In 2015, curator Hattori Hiroyuki invited Fujii to be a guest curator of the Aomori Contemporary Art Center's (ACAC) "Aomori City Archives Exhibition" series, which aims to use the cultural artefacts and artworks belonging to the former Keiko Kan Folk Heritage Museum of Aomori and "reveal the 100-year history of Japan's modernization" alongside the histories of Aomori and its community.[11][12] 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.[13] 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.[12]

For his exhibition, Fujii used various everyday objects and archival materials to show a modernization narrative centered around the changing lives of locals in the Aomori region, bringing particular attention to the "memories of the unknown people" stored in the now-defunct Keiko Kan; he tried to bring forth the histories of marginalized groups and those oppressed in the region by the nationalization of Japan—namely, the "unnamed" of modern Japan's historical narrative.[14][11] The artist arranged 5 different stages of the exhibition into scenes like a movie set, tracing 100 years of history between the local Aomori region and the Japanese nation.[14]

While the museum collection consisted primarily of everyday objects or artefacts of daily use, Fujii also called upon people living Aomori Prefecture to share home videos shot on 8mm film from 1955-75 to be part of the exhibition, as a way to show the social situation and share personal, modest, daily moments deemed unimportant to larger narratives of history.[14] As a popular and affordable medium during those years, 8mm film captured footage from a period of particularly high growth for the nation, providing a window into the rapidly changing physical and social landscape of Japan.[14] These activities were supported by "remo," an organization based in Osaka that works to collect 8mm films from around Japan to record lost archives of Japanese social history.[14]

Playing Japanese (2017) is a video and photographic installation aimed to examine Japan's historical contact with foreign entities, inspired by a British clergyman H.N. Hutchinson's 1901 ethnological study "The living races of mankind," as well as the Osaka Expo of 1903 which featured imperialist displays of indigenous peoples from Okinawa, Hokkaido, Taiwan and Korea in its anthropological "human exhibit."[15][16][17] 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.[15][16][18] 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.[15] The film style and lighting highlighted the facial features of participants.[19] 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.”[17]

Fujii won the 2017 Nissan Art Award for Playing Japanese.[17][15]

As a result of winning Grand Prix of the 2017 Nissan Art Award, Fujii was able to participate in a three-month residency at the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) in New York City.[20] 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.[21][22] Fujii also exhibited The Primary Fact at ISCP as part of his residency, cumulating in his first solo exhibition in the United States.[21]

The Primary Fact consists of a seven-channel video and photography installation based on the artist's research into a 7th century BC mass gravesite in Greece that was excavated during the construction of a park in 2016.[22] Based on his research, Fujii speculatively explored the possibility of the eighty shackled skeletons found during the excavation as having been executed after resisting the emergence of democracy in Greece in the Classical Age; the skeletons were in good health and clothed when they died, which indicates that they were likely of aristocratic background.[22] For the artwork, Fujii reenacted the moment of the mass execution as the main focus of the artwork, working with choreographer Patricia Apergi to direct a choreographed performance of all Greek male actors capturing the final moments of those killed due to the rise of democracy.[22][23] 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.[23]

While documenting the aftermath of the tsunami as part of the recorder311 project with Sendai Mediatheque, Fujii was asked by Japanese musician, Yoshihide Ōtomo, to create a documentary film that recorded the preparations, discussions, and activities of the music festival "Project Fukushima!," which attracted more than 10,000 visitors to the city of Fukushima only 5 months after the nuclear disaster crippled the region.[24][27] 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.[27] Project Fukushima! is 90-minutes in length and has been screened in various cities, including the U.K., and the U.S.[24][27]

Fujii directed ASAHIZA: Where do humans go?, a 74-minute film documenting people's memories and experiences surrounding a small wooden theatre called "Asahiza" in Minamisōma, Fukushima Prefecture, a town about 30 km from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant.[28] 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.[28] Although the theatre officially closed in 1991, it was not damaged by the 2011 disaster, and local citizens have been fighting to register it as a cultural site for the city in order to receive national funds for its restoration and preservation.[28][29]

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.[28] The completed film combines both parts, and sets it to a musical score created by Yoshihide Ōtomo.[28]

Fujii also screened his film Project Fukushima! at the Asahiza theatre in Minamisōma.[28]

Fujii was selected for an artist residency at Kadist, Paris in November 2018, where he worked on his ongoing project Les nucléaires et les choses (2019). Les nucléaires et les choses consists of multi-channel film installation and a photo series, documenting the fallout of the 2011 catastrophe on the town of Futaba in Fukushima Prefecture, which was designated a "Difficult-to-Return" zone due to the nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi Power Plant.[2][30] 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.[30] For this artwork, Fujii organized a symposium in the nearby town of Iwaki, inviting the museum curators from the Futaba Town Museum of History and Folklore as well as curators from the Hiroshima Peace Museum and National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo (MOT), as well as anthropologists, archaeologists, philosophers and political scientists to discuss the future of the local museum.[30] The end result was a multi-channel video installation documenting this discussion between art world and cultural specialists and curators, televising a conversation that would normally be held out of the public eye.[2] The installation was juxtaposed with a somber photo series depicting the devastation of Futaba and the profound emptiness of the town after its abandonment in 2011.[2]

Of this project, Fujii has stated that the "disaster opened up multiple, vast streams of time," that he felt were necessary to access as an artist engaging with the problems of collection and the passing of history to future generations, as well as the historical flow of time that led to the "nuclear disaster complex" being situated in Tōhoku in the first place.[8]