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Native of Samoa, Yuki Kihara is an interdisciplinary artist of Japanese and Samoan descent. She will be the first Pacific artist to represent New Zealand at the Venice Biennale 2022.

Through photography, dance, painting and curatorial practice, Kihara is engaging with postcolonial representation of the Pacific area from an Indigenous and unique point of view. Her works dig into themes like gender, spirituality, ecology awareness and Samoan origins.

 FA-AFAFINES : redefining Gauguin’s Models through A Maori Perspective

Fa-afafines are really crucial in “Paradise Camp”, the artistic project and long-term research that Yuki Kihara is exhibiting at Venice Biennale next month.

“I’m the first Pacific, the first Asian, the first Fa-afafine and the first trans artist to represent the country of Aotearoa”,* the artist stated proudly.

Across photography, video and archival research “Paradise Camp” features a local crew of over 80 people and was shot in Upolu Island, Sāmoa. We have few previews of it, but it is already clear that indigenous people are represented in what is considered typical costumes and poses, which intentionally refer to Gaugin’s paintings.

The French painter in fact was strongly intertwined with Samoan history of Art, which led to some University conferences and Art Galleries symposiums about his heritage in the islands culture.

With such strong presence, Indigenous responses to Paul Gauguin's artworks have been craved for and Yuki Kihara’s artworks confirm this statement.

Gaugin often represented fa-afafines figures in his paintings, they got stuck in our collective mind as “exotic” and gender-mixed figures coming from far away.

But fa-afafines are not just androgynous men with feminine clothes on canvas but instead, they refer to a distinct gender identity deeply rooted in Samoan reality.

Nowadays, Yuki Kihara represents a modern Samoan voice that summarises different needs to emerge in post-colonial reality. By taking up Gaugin models from a Maori perspective, far from prejudices and manipulation.

“Obviously, I am a Maori. And I look at Gauguin’s paintings with a Maori’s eyes; before the screens of academic training, I respond to these images of beauty from my Maori heart.”**

These words belong to the Academic Researcher Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, are what initially inspired Kihara’s “Paradise Camp” research back in 1992. The quote speaks for itself, touching upon the personal feelings of Maori artists to the Gaugin’s heritage.

“Because I grew up in a community that included men who lived and dressed and spoke as women, and actively loved me. And who were loved in return. They were just there” - Te Awekotuku continued - “As an adolescent, I followed them. Came to Auckland, and the University. Met the paintings of Gauguin. Recognised their serene, beautiful, arrogant, unforgettable faces. Twenty- five years late, I am still contemplating them, and they have become the focus of my presentation today”.

The audience can notice with joy that it is the same echo for Kihari’s work and the inspiration behind it that awaits us in Venice, in a new formula that surely will amaze many eyes.

By Miriam Panieri

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*Maori name of New Zealand

**Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, Gaugin Symposium, New Zealand, 1992