Simon Fujiwara and Who the Baer Are Saying Yes to Everything

Just as Athena sprang from the head of Zeus or Venus from the sea’s frothing foam, Simon Fujiwara’s Who the Baer emerged from the dark anarchy that was 2020. Amidst that sudden societal unraveling that’s still far too recent and raw for most of us to even touch, Simon found himself restless, desperately needing “to create a language to process everything.” Who the Baer – with their darling yellow love heart on their chest; ludicrously long, drippy tongue; and insatiable desire to be everything at once – is that language. “The character saved me in a way,” Simon reveals, “but they also plunged me into another kind of complexity. They showed me a very dark side of life. Who is also quite a scary proposition.”

At this point in our conversation, Simon suddenly asks me, “How does Who make you feel?” That he is more interested in my felt experience of his work than how I intellectualize it strikes me as beautiful somehow. I tell him that, despite their cartoonish charm, Who the Baer makes me feel haunted. I tell him that Who reminds me of The Void. Simon nods.

It would be a fair question to ask how a darling cartoon bear à la Winnie the Pooh could possibly conjure up phantoms or a Nietzschean abyss. This, in fact, is perhaps part of why Who has proven so captivating – they are both deceptively simple and wildly provocative. Throughout Simon’s stop-motion animation Hello Who?, which played on the CIRCA network of seven digital billboards around the world, Who rides a constant carousel of new identities. “Who is not balanced,” Simon explains. “They’re like, ‘I am this and I am that.’ They short-circuit and stack identities rather than go between them.” Who apes everyone from Greta Thunberg to Donald Trump, throwing themself into a new iteration before settling into their previous one. In this way, “Who is a way of being able to say yes to everything and see what that looks like.” He continues, “I can’t shift as much as Who – I don’t want to shift as much as Who – but this is what it would look like if we were to take the logic of social media or hyper-capitalism or advertising or whatever to its extreme.”

What attends this vertiginous maelstrom of image and identity is neither a rigid political statement nor an answer to this world’s woes – rather, it’s “a return to a sense of childish wonder.” The Whoniverse is full of bright colors, simple forms, and constant movement. Who plays Fujiwara’s Shakespearean fool, inviting an enjoyable (and perhaps even relieving) loss of criticality.

Simplicity Now: the specter of regression hangs over the Whoniverse. Offering his musings on the visual zeitgeist, Simon is both scathing and incisive: “With aesthetics, we want everything to look more beautiful: we like cartoons and baby stuff again. We’re doing a lot of cartoony prints and jangles and pastels. The pastel palette is a millennial palette. It gets more baby, baby, baby.” At a moment when the Metaverse is raking in billions digitizing our humanity and Memojis increasingly approximate our emotional landscapes, it does seem that some infantile impulse towards self-reduction is at work. “As things get more complex, the world actually demands that I become simpler as well,” Simon continues, referring to the neoliberal need for clarity and self-disclosure. “It’s like, ‘We just want to know what you are and what you want, then we can sell it to you.’ That’s it. Who came out of this situation.”

In this context, Simon felt that it would be “much riskier, and more progressive, for Who to be a ‘yes’ person.” While the “yes plus yes” formulation allows Who to cripple the neoliberal capitalist systems demanding that they be easily defined and categorized, they fall into another trap: “yes and yes is basically how the right wing functions,” Simon explains. While the left suggests that trade-offs are politically necessary, the new right tends to promise everything at once: “You can have your country and you can have all your white people. And you can have your economy back. And you can have your national costumes. And everyone’s going to be really happy” – all this, plus lower taxes, for example. While Who’s simplicity may be appealing, it can easily slide into something sinister.

Beyond capitalism and populism, though, Who the Baer has allowed Simon to explore the possibility of submission as a political strategy. Steering our conversation back to the pandemic, he begins, “The last couple of years have been like activism central, right? Active, active, active. You’re not doing enough, you’re not doing enough, you’re not doing enough.” This atmospheric imperative to act more, do more, be better, has dogged Simon for far longer than the past two years: “And I’ve never done enough, but that’s also been a big question my whole life: I’m exhausted by doing shit because I’ve been the only non-white person in a white context my entire childhood. I’ve been gay, I’ve been this, I’ve been that, like a set of badges I can wear. I’ve just constantly tried to go beyond being this cartoon – because that’s what you become if you’re an unknown thing. It’s that, ‘Oh, well, let’s just give me that shape.’” Who the Baer, by virtue of their shapeshifting essence, allows Simon to explore what radical and ecstatic submission to external demands looks like: “It’s like, ‘Are you willing to give me that?’ Okay, I’ll do that. You want me to be that? Okay, I’ll be that as well. ‘Would you like to taste this?’ Yes, I’ll sit here and taste it and stick my massive tongue into it and consume it and cover it with slime.” Like Ryan Atwood, Who is whoever you want them to be – and there’s some kind of peace in that.

Let it be known that Simon “[doesn’t] pose this as an idea to solve politics in any way.” That’s why he’s an artist, he says: “What if this is not activist work at all? What if it’s something else?” He’s had a recent epiphany, too, which tracks with the question he asked earlier about how Who made me feel: “I’m just trying to capture what it feels like,” he says. “I’m just trying to display, present, translate, this feeling that we all have – that I have – this gut feeling.” He doesn’t elaborate on what that gut feeling is, but somehow it rings all the more true in its vagueness. Like Simon says, there is no language to adequately work through the complexity of our world, the horror and chaos of the past few years in particular. We’re all Who the Baer, inhabiting a dizzying world of images and expectations and identities. “What people really want is for someone to say, ‘I get it,’” Simon reveals. “That’s all anyone actually wants. They just want to be told, ‘It’s hard, isn’t it? I see it too.’”