Simon Fujiwara SS Salvation, 2020

Simon Fujiwara’s work often blends personal experiences with fantasy and imagination, opening up new possibilities for what the Self can be. In his body of work Syphilis: A Conquest (2020–23), he turns his own contraction and recovery from syphilis into a fantastical adventure. The sexually transmitted disease has a long, complex history. Thought to have reached Europe via the ships of colonizer Christopher Columbus returning from the American continent in the fifteenth century, it entered the cultural imagination and was romanticized by artists and writers as a mark of genius.