The Eighth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

SHIGEYUKI (YUKI) KIHARA Samoa/Aotearoa New Zealand b.1975 German Monument, Mulinu’u (from ‘Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?’ series) 2013 Type C photograph on premium matte photographic paper, ed. 5/5 / 59.5 x 84cm / Purchased 2015 with funds fromMary-Jeanne Hutchinson through the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery century before as European ships breached the shores of the archipelago. In the tradition of siva, Kihara’s hauntingly beautiful, contemporary interpretation brings the past into the present, securing the continuity of the living and the dead. Death continues to haunt the Western mind as an ending beyond which lies paradise, damnation or an eternal abyss. Death was, in 1897, the vanishing point which inspired French artist Paul Gauguin’s celebrated panoramic painting set in the South Seas, Where do we come from?What are we?Where are we going? Kihara’s twenty-first-century photographic tableaux of the same title returns to these questions, but from a very different perspective. Dressed once again as Salome, Kihara presents her back to the camera, refusing its prescriptive colonial gaze even as she turns her own gaze towards some of its monuments. In this backward-looking movement and in Kihara’s referencing of both Gauguin and the early New Zealand photographer Thomas Andrew, 7 there is an assertion of the importance of continuing to face history — as what is to come is intrinsically tied to our historical inheritance and how this is described. For Kihara, there is no doubt that representations of Samoa and its people within a predominantly colonial archive require redress. Performance, and particularly its re-contextualised historic representation, offers one way of exposing the problematic ideals upon which Western understandings of Pacific cultural practices and people have been based. The embedded performance within Kihara’s work rewrites the colonial narrative, transposing idealised, frozen documentation into representations rich with culturally embedded knowledge and meaning. Connections between dance and the fight to retain a particular identity, sense of place or belief resonate throughout this APT, particularly in the figurative sculptures of Francis Upritchard, which appear caught in balletic poses of combat as they strive towards some unknown goal. Rights