Image: Hikaru Fujii, Coastal Landscape Record (U.S. Military), Futaba District, Fukushima Prefecture, 1947, 2026. Collection of the artist
The Artizon Museum in Tokyo has invited the artist Hikaru Fujii to the seventh edition of its "Jam Session" series, in which a contemporary artist works in dialogue with the Ishibashi Foundation Collection. "Jam Session: The Ishibashi Foundation Collection × FUJII Hikaru WHOSE LIGHT?" runs from October 24, 2026, to January 31, 2027, in the museum's sixth-floor galleries. The museum has staged a Jam Session every year since it opened in 2020.
Fujii's practice examines the close ties between art, society and history through detailed research and fieldwork. He is known for video installations that rethink history by combining scripted, staged "cinematic" methods with objective documentary recording, and his critical engagement with present-day social issues has drawn attention in Japan and abroad, according to the museum.
For this exhibition he starts from the central theme of the allegory of the cave in Book VII of Plato's "Republic," the equation of light with truth. Rather than asking what the light reveals, Fujii turns the question around to ask who is casting that light, and in doing so questions the structure of truth itself. In response, 22 works from the Ishibashi Foundation Collection are arranged along a timeline running from antiquity through the Middle Ages and the modern era to the postwar period, together with more than a dozen works by Fujii, including new pieces.
Collection works shown on the exhibition page include Jackson Pollock's "Number 2, 1951," Alberto Giacometti's "Bust of Diego" (1954–55), Albrecht Dürer's "The Holy Family with Three Hares" (1498) and Sakamoto Hanjirō's "Three Brave Human Bombs" (1935). Fujii's contributions include new works from 2026, among them "The Theologian and His Voice" and a coastal landscape record based on 1947 U.S. military aerial photographs of Futaba, Fukushima, as well as an installation made from Syro-Palestinian glass and medieval Iranian ceramics in the foundation's collection. Earlier works such as "The First Fact" (2018) and "Mujō" (2019) are also included.
Fujii has exhibited at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, M+, MMCA in Korea, the National Gallery Singapore and the Centre Pompidou-Metz, and took part in the Asia Pacific Triennial in 2021 and the Rencontres d'Arles in 2024. He received the Tokyo Contemporary Art Award 2020–2022. A series of talks accompanies the show, including a conversation between Fujii and Robert Campbell, director of the Sendai Mediatheque, on November 7.
