Simon Fujiwara, Studio Pietà (King Kong Komplex)

Simon Fujiwara is the very model of a modern emerging art star: He's young, gay, good-looking and multicultural. His mother was British, his father Japanese, and he spent various parts of his childhood in Japan, Africa, England (bucolic Cornwall especially) and Spain, where his parents ran a bar for a while. Naturally, this rich heritage offers ample fodder for the sort of overproduced art about Identity (always cap the I) that screams ambition, and takes up space at various biennials and art fairs (not to mention contemporary-art collections). For his New York debut, Fujiwara offers an installation that debuted at the 2013 Sharjah Biennial in the United Arab Emirates. An old beach photo of the artist's mother being lifted by a former boyfriend, who happened to be Lebanese, provides the source for disquisitions on art history (yes, that Pietà), Hollywood and the Middle East. This guy does not aim low.