KANA KAWANISHI GALLERY is pleased to announce the opening of The 20th Century Ghost, a solo exhibition by Akira Fujimoto, on Saturday, July 7th.

RE-CODE is a body of work by Fujimoto in which he re-fixes half dissolved images of publicly renowned figures and symbols, such as animation characters, great masters’ paintings, currency symbols, and many other motifs onto canvases and other mediums by deliquescing the surfaces of the images with water and chemicals. In this exhibition, Fujimoto will exhibit new works from the series, featuring portraits of iconic figures who made innovative impacts in the 20th century.

“Freedom” and “equality” are ideologies that pervaded in the 20th century. Although they both are essentials of the current society, it is also true that they are the cause of perplexing dilemmas, such as war for democratization, security treaty issues, nuclear deterrences, human rights, limited energy sources, and many other unsolved disputes. Throughout the 20th century, photography have served their roles as evidences of the history, while nowadays, they have redeemed their conventional values of originals with the tide of digitization and data replication acquiring their generality. In this exhibition, Fujimoto will make original paintings from replications of portraits to once again attain their oneness, and spotlight the ghost of “common sense” that embodies the world of today.

Fujimoto was enrolled in Fabrica, the communication research centre in Italy, after completing his M.F.A. in Tokyo University of the Arts. After working as a faculty at Intermedia Art, Tokyo University of the Arts, he has been organizing and curating various projects that query the phenomenon occurring out of human control in our society and environment. This exhibition will be the first occasion to showcase Fujimoto’s works as a solo exhibition in a commercial gallery, who has been active in the area of Socially Engaged Arts with projects including 2021 and SONO AIDA.