An octopus, a wave

Written by Lisa Wilke

In a new long-term project, interdisciplinary artist Yuki Kihara draws on the traditional knowledges pounded into Saˉmoan barkcloth and the rich symbolism of kimono. Lisa Wilkie discusses the visual metaphors and complex materiality of Kihara’s first five ‘siapo kimono’

Yuki Kihara’s grandmother Masako Kihara stands by her suited husband, dressed for a family wedding in the most formal of kimono-wear: a crested tomesode in black silk crêpe with ornate dye-work and embroidery along the lower half. However, it was not the elegant ensemble in this photograph that planted the seed for Kihara’s latest project, サ-モアのうた (Sa¯ moa no uta) A Song About Sa¯ moa, but a brown everyday kimono she discovered packed away in storage. When Kihara found this kimono, the first thing that struck her was its colour. Rather than the bright colours often associated with kimono, the hue of the silk was more akin to those produced by the natural dyes used in siapo, or Sa¯moan barkcloth. If a kimono could be brown, why could it not be made from siapo as well? The merging of two distinct textile traditions was the next logical step for the Sa¯moan-Japanese artist.

Kihara expects to roll out サ-モアのうた (Sa¯ moa no uta) A Song About Sa¯ moa over five years. Eventually comprising 20 siapo kimono, it will also include multimedia and performance works by the artist. The expansive project is underpinned by two years’ research into topics including ethnobotany, textile conservation and social anthropology. Its title is drawn from the lyrics of a popular Japanese song used in primary schools which, Kihara notes, propagates enduring Orientalist and Romantic tropes of ‘noble savages’ living in an untouched Pacific paradise. Kihara views the synthesis of Sa¯moan and Japanese textile traditions as an authentic expression of her lived Sa¯moan-Japanese experience. She uses her personal history as a lens through which to (re)consider conversations about cultural myths, transPacific connections and cultural translations.

While Kihara speaks of cultural translation, she is quick to emphasise that this is not a one-way process but rather many acts of negotiation and compromise. Each time Kihara chooses a motif to include, she sacrifices others; the artist is keenly aware that she is selecting not only which stories are told and left untold, but how the chosen stories are performed. The centuries-old histories of kimono and siapo are rich with cultural memory and generational knowledge, and each occupies a central role in the narratives of its culture.

The item recognised today as a kimono has its roots in the kosode (ko-sode, small-sleeved), an undergarment worn beneath layered robes and over hakama (trousers). At first influenced by Chinese dress traditions, Japanese dress began to develop its own aesthetic voice during the Heian period in the 9th to late 12th centuries. Complex dress codes at the Japanese imperial court governed what styles, colours and fabrics could be worn by whom, and outfits were regulated according to specific events, months and seasons. Court-dwellers would don numerous under and over-garments to create layered compositions of hue and texture that were closely linked to the cycles of the natural world.

The colour combinations and fabric choices (different weights of silk, hemp, cotton) selected by an individual transmitted detailed information about the wearer’s personality, social status and aesthetic sensibilities – or the lack thereof. Glimpses of these sartorial rules can be found in a guide written for the Senior Grand Empress Tashi in the late 12th century, as quoted in Liz Dalby’s Kimono: Fashioning Culture. For instance, Minamoto Masasuke, a senior master of court ceremony, recommended that the following ensemble, called “Azalea (tsutsuji)”, be worn at the time of the Kamo Festival in early summer: “The top three robes are graduated shades of scarlet-pink in the order dark, medium, light. The remaining two robes are deep blue-green and pale blue-green. The chemise is either white or scarlet-pink.”

This recommendation was accompanied by personal notes (believed by some to be those of the empress), which reveal room for individual preference when selecting an outfit: “With lined garments in the fourth lunar month, it is always preferable to wear a chemise of raw white silk. After the Kamo Festival, when one wears robes of raw silk, then it is fine to wear a pink chemise. I think that when the lined garments are coloured, the chemise ought to be white.”

Like kimono, siapo also possesses and displays forms of knowledge that may be ‘read’ by those familiar with its cultural language. Siapo is made from the bark of the paper-mulberry tree, cuttings of which were brought to the Pacific from Southeast Asia thousands of years ago. Traditionally, the trees are tended by men, while clothmaking is the domain of women. As clothing, siapo was reserved for those of noble lineage but the fabric also had a range of utilitarian uses in the home, was used for shrouds and as a commodity when exchanging gifts, or paying taxes and tribute. The cloth takes on a performative role, presenting and re-presenting customs and histories to a variety of audiences, a textural (and textual) parallel to the performance of oratory revered in Sa¯moan culture. As Nikau Gabrielle Hindin writes in the recent book Crafting Aotearoa, “Barkcloth’s intertwined fibres are loaded with ancestry; it was pounded with song and storytelling and decorated by the earth.”

Siapo producers and sisters Ambronesia and Sylvia Hanipale are two of the artisans integral to Kihara’s collaborative artwork. Despite coming from a line of siapo makers, their mother and grandmother originally discouraged the Hanipale sisters from following in the family footsteps, preferring that they look for ‘real’ career opportunities. Ignoring this advice, the women, both in their early 30s, have embraced their role as siapo-makers and created the 60 metres of cloth needed for the kimono. Graphic designers and a nihonga illustrator helped Kihara finalise the composition of the mural design, and printing experts experimented with dye and printing techniques to achieve the saturated colour seen in the finished objects. Members of Kihara’s extended ‘a¯iga collected shells and seed pods, embroidered and stitched beadwork to produce the surface embellishment that brings the painted images to life. Each step in the process of making (from investigation, cloth production and illustration to stitching and mending) produces and re-produces individual and communal knowledge, in new and changing forms.

Like a living creature, siapo shrinks and expands with changes in humidity and temperature; those stitching on the garments would find that their beading had shifted overnight or that previously straight seams and flat surfaces had warped and waved. The weight of applied shells would tear the cloth, requiring traditional patching methods. The artworks continue to evolve through time, recalling the Sa¯moan notion of walking backwards into the future: engagement with the time-honoured skills and stories of the ancestors ensures their presence in the here-and-now and informs innovation and the shape of stories to come.

Seen in isolation, each of Kihara’s siapo kimono is in and of itself an artwork that draws on traditions of sculpture, textile art and illustration. Considering the works as singular art objects, however, is to miss their broader conceptual framework. Kihara’s oceanscape extends across all five kimono and the form of its waves is distinctively Japanese, recalling Hokusai’s Great Wave. Interspersed with traditional siapo patterns, the semicircular seigaiha, representing wave crests, reinforces the omnipresence and importance of the ocean, as do the far-reaching tentacles of the nihonga-styled fe‘e, or octopus. The Pacific Ocean, or Moana, or Vasa, is figured as a space that embraces both Japan and the many islands of Micronesia, Polynesia and Melanesia: it is a relational space rather than a divisive one. In her conception of an ocean that encompasses rather than divides, Kihara draws on writer Albert Wendt’s description of Sa¯moan ‘va¯’ and the Japanese ‘ma’. Both these spatial concepts allow separate things to exist together, lying between them and uniting them.

In this unifying space between lie Masako Kihara’s unassuming brown kimono and the siapo created by generations of Hanipale women. With cultural information embedded in their fibres and memories written in their hand-worked stitching, the siapo kimono of サ-モアのうた (Sa¯ moa no uta) A Song About Sa¯ moa explore how visual metaphor and materiality can be used to interpret myth, connection and narrative across space and over time. Multiple knowledges and truths intersect in the project and, as they do, narrative meanings shift and are regenerated. With 15 more kimono planned, Kihara will be negotiating the va¯/ma – the in-between spaces – for some time to come.