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The Journey Continues: New Currents in Oceanic Art

2022/05/05 Views：349

The Journey Continues: New Currents in Oceanic Art

Reuben Friend (Director of Pātaka Art+Museum / Curatorial Consultant of Pan-Austro-Nesian Arts Festival )

 

Freed from the Vitrine

In 2009 the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Art invited Jim Vivieaere, a Rarotonga artist and curator from Aotearoa New Zealand, to co-curate an exhibition entitled The Great Journey: In Pursuit of the Ancestral Realm. Seeking to locate Taiwan culturally and geographically within the Island realms of Oceania, Vivieaere’s contribution to The Great Journey and the legacy of his curatorial practice became an important touchstone in my thinking around the PAN project and the artists proposed for this exhibition.
The idea of ‘Islandness’ within contemporary art had been a problematic subject that Vivieaere had sought to resolve for many years prior to The Great Journey. Vivieaere’s groundbreaking 1994 exhibition Bottled Ocean at City Gallery Wellington left an indelible mark on the art history of Aotearoa New Zealand, marking an important moment of change in the outdated anthropological consideration of Oceanic art and artists at that time. As Dr Peter Brunt writes in the 2012 publication Art in Oceania, ‘Bottled Ocean made the “arrival” of contemporary Pacific art in the elite galleries of the New Zealand art world a problem to be reflected upon, rather than simply a triumph to celebrate. Having been invited to survey the work of Pacific migrants, Vivieaere turned the exhibition into something of an installation, a work of art in its own right…”.[1]
As an artist-curator, Vivieare had a unique perspective and ability to reframe curatorial practice as an extension of his own art practice. Vivieaere’s master stroke in Bottled Ocean was the placement of artworks behind a clear acrylic screen, bottling the exhibition within a giant museum vitrine. Freeing Pacific art from the vitrine of archaeology and anthropology would become a lifelong endeavour, and a legacy that would free new generations of Oceanic artists and curators to explore new currents in contemporary practice.
I was 13 years old when Bottled Ocean opened, completely unaware of the art historical negotiations taking place. When The Great Journey opened in Taiwan in 2009, I was still finishing my Masters Degree in Māori Art at Massey University and had just been appointed Curator Māori-Pacific at City Gallery Wellington. Jim Vivieaere’s legacy at the institution was palpable. I felt swept up in the torrent of information and critical discourse that Jim and his peers had navigated many years before my emergence on the scene. For me, Jim was Kupe. The great Oceanic navigator who sailed to Aotearoa from Eastern Polynesia a thousand years ago, carving pathways in the sea and sky, traversing turbulent waters, confronting titans, claiming new terrain. Mortals, such as myself, followed in his wake.
Vivieaere’s contemporaries, giants of Oceanic thought, such as Epeli Hau’ofa and Teresia Teaiwa, challenged us to rethink our place in the world, rejecting European paradigms and descriptors of ourselves. Teaiwa’s poetry and academic writing told us, “We sweat and cry salt water, so we know that the ocean is really in our blood.”[2] This reawakening of our cultural sovereignty, to articulate ourselves using our own terms, was reinforced by Hau’ofa who explained, ‘…continental men – Europeans and Americans – drew imaginary lines across the sea, making the colonial boundaries that confined ocean peoples to tiny spaces for the first time. These boundaries today define the island states and territories of the Pacific. I have just used the term ocean peoples because our ancestors, who had lived in the Pacific for over two thousand years, viewed their world as "a sea of islands" rather than as "islands in the sea."[3]
     In the years since The Great Journey, a lot has changed, and much remains the same. Pacific Island artists featured in Bottled Ocean and The Great Journey, Michel Tuffery and Greg Semu, have enjoyed much success navigating the art world, establishing international careers as contemporary artists. Māori artists Shane Cotton and Lisa Reihana, who accompanied Tuffery and Semu in The Great Journey, have established themselves as two of Aotearoa New Zealand’s most bankable contemporary artists, with Reihana in particular being selected for the 57th La Biennale di Venezia in 2017. Pākehā New Zealand artist Virginia King, who Jim selected for The Great Journey, has also gone on to be one of the country’s most prominent sculptures.

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Though Vivieaere, Hau’ofa and Teaiwa are no longer with us, having sailed beyond daylight in return to the ancestral realm, I see new generations of Moana artists and scholars on the horizon, with their paddles in the water, rising on the wake of elders gone before. New generations of Pacific Island artists, curators and scholars have embraced Indigenous language terms such as Vā and Wā to describe the physical space that connects our islands nations, peoples and communities across seas. These terms bear a striking similarity to the Japanese notion of Mā, being an architectural measure of distance between set points in space, suggesting deeper cultural and linguistic connections across Asia and Oceania that are yet to be uncovered.
Many of my peers, and younger generations of Pacific Island artists and curators, have expressed a strong desire to completely reject the terms ‘Pacific’ and ‘Oceania’ in favour of self-determined Indigenous language terms. Most audibly, Australian-based artist and scholar Dr Léuli Eshrāghi advocates for the term ‘Moana’ or ‘Moananui’ as more culturally and linguistically appropriate words to describe Oceania and the island nations of the Pacific. In his 2015 essay We are born of the Fanua: Moananui Arts Practice in Australia he explains, “Moananui ā kea in ‘Ōlelo Hawai’i denotes the great ocean linked to [the] ancestor Kea. Te Moananui a Kiwa in reo Māori denotes the great ocean linked to [the] ancestor Kiwa.” As a term, he explains “Moananui a Kiwa or Moananui ā kea encompasses vast worlds of atoll and volcanic archipelagos, all connected through millennial vā of customary exchange, from Timor, Kaho’olawe and Pora Pora to Viti Levu, Te Ika a Māui and Rekohu. Thousands of peoples maintain Moananui geocultural, sociopolitical and spiritual practices in every part of this expansive ocean, and far beyond it through international diaspora.”[4]
Moana artists and scholars have yet to reach consensus on the use of this term, as art writer and curator Ioana Gordon-Smith notes in her 2015 essay Terms of convenience, “For me, ‘Moananui’ feels uncomfortable, like a foreign word I’m not quite sure I’m using correctly. It lacks the vagueness that ‘Pacific’ allows. But that, in part, is its appeal. The word feels complex and specific in a way that the catch-all terms such as Pacific, Pasifika and Oceania don’t.”[5] Part of the difficulty with catch-all terms is that they often do not catch all the nuance they are supposed to embody. This is the case with the terms Moana and Moananui, which loosely translate to Ocean and Great Ocean, but in doing so largely privilege the language groups of central Polynesia. As these terms are not used by all Indigenous language groups of Oceania, there is cause for concerns that some island nations may feel marginalised by this proposed naming convention. That being said, the term has been gaining momentum with various academics and art writers in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, and it feels only a matter of time before it reaches critical mass as the new/old collective term for our island nations and peoples, at least within academic circles.
This reclamation of Oceanic words and worldviews aligns with a growing global awareness of the ocean as a physical extension of ourselves, embodied in ecological concerns for the health and safety of our ocean homes, the creatures that live here and sustain us, and the populations of island nations that are increasingly under threat from climate change and sea level rise. As curator Mei-Chen Tseng shared in her 2009 preliminary catalogue for The Great Journey, “The art and culture of Taiwan and the South Pacific bear witness to the migration and development of Austronesian peoples throughout the Pacific. The linkages between Taiwan and the South Pacific extends to the ecological environment, language, myths and legends, houses, tools and lifestyles. In the context of contemporary art, the Austronesian peoples can draw on their extensive pedigrees. And even in the midst of modern civilization, they can still rely on clearly defined cultural roots.”[6] This sentiment holds true today, with a continued generational return to customary art and craft making practices. The artists that I have selected for the PAN project all share these concerns, claiming space in the present through a reclamation of the past, but with increasingly grave concern for the future.

 

 

Sāmoan-Japanese artist Yuki Kihara grew up with her family in Japan before moving to Samoa and eventually Aotearoa New Zealand where she undertook formal studies in art and fashion. Returning to Samoa as an adult, her research and art practice of recent has focused strongly on customary siapo barkcloth practices overlaid with scientific analysis of ocean ecosystems surrounding the islands of Samoa. Her expansive sculptural landscape paintings in the PAN exhibition, entitled サ-モアのうた (Sāmoa no uta) A Song About Sāmoa, take the form of five Japanese furisode kimono, a style of Japanese kimono that is customarily worn by young woman. Made of siapo, the sculptures combine Samoan and Japanese printmaking practices as an evocation of the artist’s ancestral heritage.
    
Kihara has been selected for the next La Biennale di Venezia in 2022, a huge moment for her as an individual and as a representative for her people. Kihara will be the first Asian, the first Samoan and the first transgender fa’afafine artist to represent Aotearoa New Zealand. As a cultural ambassador, Kihara’s adornment of the furisode kimono is a political act for LGBTQI+ communities, as well as Moana MVPFAFF communities which include mahu, vakasalewa, palopa, fa’afafine, akava’ine, fakaleiti (leiti) and fakafifine. These Indigenous language terms demonstrate the diversity of Moana gender roles and identity.[7]   
While the furisode style kimono connotes a personal contemplation on matters of gender role identity in Samoa and Japan, the broader concern of the work extends beyond the personal, communicating narratives related to the Anthropocene. Images printed onto each kimono illustrate the effects of climate change and industrialisation in the Pacific. Here the complex confluence of the artist’s transcultural identity and her celebratory reclamation of customary craft practices is met with an urgent and hostile geopolitical dilemma, as the actions of Asia, Europe and the Americas increasingly impinge on the existence of life in Oceania. Unfortunately, Kihara’s desire to transport urgent messages from the Moana to the epicentre of the artworld may need to be mitigated in relation to the global pandemic that has become so emblematic of the failing health and wellbeing of our planet.

 

Yuki Kihara, サ - モアのうた (Sāmoa no uta) A Song About Sāmoa (2019) Installation view
5 piece installation; Samoan siapo, textiles, beads, shells, plastic; kimonos 1750 x 1330 x 150 mm each. 
Courtesy of Yuki Kihara and Milford Galleries Dunedin, Aotearoa New Zealand.

 

Like Kihara, artist John Pule creates paintings that are specific to the Moana experience, but hold huge international presence in major public and private collections around the world. Pule’s paintings in PAN reconsider customary Niuean hiapo (barkcloth) painting and printmaking through a lens of modernity. Here in his paintings, ancestral star charts and seafaring imagery give way to cloud-like island formations, as air travel supplants vaka traditions (seafaring ships) creating new perspectives of Oceania. These are personal stories, tales of the Moana that he knows, as seen from his seat in the sky aboard an Air New Zealand flight between his two homes in Niue and Aotearoa New Zealand. Again, we see a Moana artist engaged with the politics of trans-nationalism, of technology disrupting past practices and lived cultural experiences. In this way Pule’s personal narratives are emblematic of the collective, of the Moana that we reside in today, and the experience of the Moana that resides in us. As Dr Peter Brunt states, “there can be no new without an old, without some sense of the Oceania that is past or passing.” Referencing Albert Wendt pivotal 1976 essay Towards a New Oceania, Brunt states “He [Wendt] was not referring to the Oceania of history books, museums and excavation sites, but rather to an Oceania in us, a subjective proposition addressed to the consciousness of modern Pacific Islanders.”[8]

 

John Pule, Kehe tau hauaga foou (To all new arrivals), enamel, oil, pencil, pastel, oil stick and ink on canvas, 2007. 
Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, gift of the Patrons of the Auckland Art Gallery, 2007. Courtesy of Auckland Art Gallery.

 

New technologies and digital media again converge with customary practice as a central creative tenet in the artworks of Ngahina Hohaia, an Indigenous Māori artist from Aotearoa New Zealand. Like a beating heart, the rhythmic sound of pounding drums and poi reverberate from the centre of Paopao ki tua o rangi (2009), a stunning audio-visual and woven fibre installation. The title of the installation translates to ‘reverberations beyond the heavens’, suggesting a continuation of sound, song and voice into the celestial realm, beyond the lifetime of past generations.
The installation is constructed from poi, a traditional Māori percussion instrument. Customarily made from flax or bulrush leaves, they consist of a small soft ball attached to a woven cord. The cord is held in one hand, and the ball is swung in circles and hit in different directions with the performer’s free hand, creating a rhythmic beat and twirling movement of the poi. This beating sound and movement is accompanied by chanting and ritual incantation that is sung in ceremony. This ceremonial practice is known as Poi Manu and is customarily invoked for ceremonial purpose in the artists home village of Parihaka on the West Coast of the North Island.
Raised in a family of artists and political activists, Hohaia’s artworks draw on inherited skills and knowledge of traditional Māori song, ritual incantations and fibre works. The songs composed for installation are sung by the artist and her late father Te Miringa Hohaia, a leader of significance who was instrumental in the resurgence of Parihaka arts, culture and politics in the late twentieth century.

 

Ngahina Hohaia, Paopao ki tua o rangi, multimedia projection installation, 5000x5000mm, 
2009. Photography by Mark Tantrum at Pātaka Art+Museum in 2016.

 

When talking about Moana artists, it is hard not to mention the dark legacy of colonisation that still haunts Indigenous communities today. For Hohaia and her community, this means seeking reparations for ill deeds committed by colonial forces as far back as 1879, when the New Zealand government began surveying Māori lands near Parihaka for sale to European settlers. In defence of their lands, the spiritual leaders of the time Tohu Kākahi and Te Whiti-o-Rongomai began a programme of peaceful protest, disrupting proceedings by pulling out survey pegs and fence posts, and ploughing lands that had been appropriated by colonial settlers. In the process many people from Parihaka were arrested and imprisoned without trial in the South Island of Aotearoa New Zealand. On the morning of 5 November 1881, the New Zealand government sent in a constabulary of over 1,500 armed colonial troops to forcibly take the settlement of Parihaka. Fighting evil with good, Tohu and Te Whiti instructed the children of Parihaka to greet the intruders at the gates with offerings of food and song, while the elders sat peacefully awaiting the onslaught. The strategy had some success, repelling the first wave of invasion, but eventually the frontline troops were compelled by their superiors to push through the wall of gifts and kindness, completing the assault with devastating results. The township was almost entirely razed to the ground and the inhabitants arrested or forced off the land indefinitely.
Curated for exhibition within the hallowed ivory-coloured chapels of contemporary art, Paopao ki tua o rangi forces non-Indigenous art audiences to hear the voices of Indigenous peoples, to hear Indigenous versions of the history of this place, to acknowledge the people in and of the land upon which we stand. Like Kihara and Pule, Hohaia’s work is a complex web of interrelated cultural, political and creative histories tethered to this place and time.
In the Māori language we have a proverb, ‘ka mua, ka muri’. It refers to the idea of walking backwards into the future. We can see the past laid out in front of us, but the future is unseeable. Meaning that we must consider the past to move forward. Being freed from the vitrine, the bottled-up confines of Western dominated narratives, has provided the freedom for new generations to explore new waters, to decolonize and Indigenize our practices, rethinking the terms and terminology we use to describe ourselves, our experiences and our interrelations.

 

 

 
 
[1] Peter Brunt and Nicholas Thomas (eds.), Art in Oceania: A New History, London: Thames & Hudson, 2012; and Peter Brunt (editor and coordinator), ‘Roundtable: Thinking through Oceania Now’, Reading Room: A Journal of Art and Culture, no. 4 (Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, 2010), 82-104.
[2] Teresia Teaiwa, ‘We sweat and cry salt water, so we know that the ocean is really in our blood’, in International Feminist Journal of Politics, 19:2, 2017, pp.133-136.
[3] Epeli Hau’ofa, ‘Our Sea of Islands’ in The Contemporary Pacific, Volume 6, Number 1, Spring 1994, 147–161. First published in A New Oceania: Rediscovering Our Sea of Islands, edited by Vijay Naidu, Eric Waddell, and Epeli Hau‘ofa. Suva: School of Social and Economic Development, The University of the South Pacific, 1993.
[4] Dr Léuli Eshrāghi, ‘We are born of the Fanua: Moananui Arts Practice in Australia’ in Artlink, 35:2, June 2015, p.65.
[5] Ioana Gordon-Smith, ‘Terms of Convenience’, accessed 02 April 2021 from https://ioanagordonsmith.com/2015/09/20/terms-of-convenience/#_ednref11.
[6] Pamela Zeplin, ‘Expanding Oceania, A Review of Art in the Contemporary Pacific, 2009: The Great Journey: In Pursuit of the Ancestral Realm’, Pacific Arts, vol. 9, no. 1, 2010, pp. 35–39. Accessed 04 April 2021 from www.jstor.org/stable/23412114. Accessed 9 May 2021.
​[7] Phylesha Acton-Brown, ‘Rainbow/LGBQTI’, Le Va, accessed 12 May 2021 from https://www.leva.co.nz/our-work/suicide-prevention/finding-help/support-services/rainbow/.
[8] Peter Brunt, ‘History and Imagination in the Art of John Pule’ in Hauaga: The Art of John Pule, Otago University Press in association with City Gallery Wellington, Dunedin and Wellington, 2010, p 83.

 

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