Studio Pietà (King Kong Komplex)

The triptych refers to a lost photograph from the 1960s, showing the artist’s mother and her Lebanese boyfriend. Fujiwara, remembering no more than the general composition of the representation – a woman carrying a man in her arms – employed the compositional scheme of the Pieta by Michelangelo. To recreate the pose, he used a purpose-built structure and introduced some stage props to suggest that the action was taking place on the beach. The resultant photographs appear all the more artificial due to the differences in ethnic origin of the protagonists. The work has a political and social dimension; the eponymous King Kong complex is a reference to the stereotypical set of characteristics of a Middle Eastern male, which the artist used in selecting his male model.