Press Release
This exhibition adopted a new and unique perspective to interpret the legacy of Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881–1973). More than sixty masterpieces by Picasso will be on loan from Musée national Picasso-Paris (MnPP), which holds the largest and most significant repository of Picasso’s works in the world. They will be placed in conversation with around 130 pieces from the M+ Collections by thirty Asian and Asian-diasporic artists from the early twentieth century to the present.
One of the new commissioned works is Simon Fujiwara's large-scale painting Who vs Who vs Who? (A Picture of a Massacre). The monumental work draws on Picasso's Massacre in Korea (1951) and interprets it through Fujiwara's character Who the Bær. Who the Bær is a unique cartoon character in the form of a bear that seemingly has no gender, race, sexuality or even a clear design. Without an identity, Who exists only as an image, a status that allows them the freedom to roam a world of online images, appropriating characters, identities, aesthetics and guises in a greedy search for a ‘self’. The dynamic composition of Who vs Who vs Who? (A Picture of a Massacre) presents two groups of figures, the victims and the perpetrators, and updates the dramatic scene of Picasso's Massacre with elements of contemporaneity, such as drones and smartphones, thus contextualizing the topics of violence and conflict in our present visual culture and the current state of the over-saturated mediatized world.
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