The Ninth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

159 ARTISTS Somuk, Moah and Images of the Crisis Gregory Dausi MOAH Born 1911, Gagan, Buka District, Autonomous Region of Bougainville; died 1988, Gagan Lived and worked in Gagan Herman SOMUK Born c.1901, Gagan, Buka District, Autonomous Region of Bougainville; died 1965, Gagan Lived and worked in Gagan Established 2012, Autonomous Region of Bougainville (AROB) Led by PNG Red Cross Society, Buka Centre, International Committee of the Red Cross and University of Papua New Guinea Workshops held in Buka, Gagan, Rorovana and Moro In APT9, bold linear drawings and paintings profile three generations of artists from the Autonomous Region of Bougainville, from the time of early contact with missionaries to the present day. Working with introduced materials, each artist has recorded their unique vision of culture and time. A distinctive silhouetted human form — also found on pre-contact lime pots (used for storing lime powder which is eaten with buai [betel nut]), canoes, paddles and slit-gongs (musical instruments) — is a constant in the works and represents a dynamic tradition of figurative memorialisation. 1 The earliest and most internationally renowned of the artists, Herman Somuk (c.1901–65) lived and worked in the village of Biroat, near the Catholic mission of Gagan, in the lush mountain range that runs along the western coast of Letana Island (Buka Island). Brought up in the traditional culture of his people, Somuk attended the local missionary school, where he was encouraged in a lifelong practice of drawing by the nuns and resident priest, Father Lukan. A pioneering catechist for the Catholic Church, Somuk is remembered as a fiercely independent man who remained connected to land and faithful to the customs of his Naboin clan. 2 Despite the growing economy based around the colonial plantations, Somuk refused to work as a labourer, instead earning a living from his church duties, his own farming and the sale of his drawings. 3 In the mid 1930s, Somuk was introduced to amateur anthropologist Father Patrick O’Reilly, who documented Somuk’s drawings and later championed exhibitions of his work in Europe. 4 Today, these drawings provide one of the only glimpses of life in Bougainville during the early colonial period from an indigenous perspective. Remembered as a dynamic orator, Somuk's drawings extend this energy by recounting ceremony, fighting and hunting, alongside scenes of imposed plantation labour in a style that is alive with the details of life and conveyed through tragedy and humour. Significantly, silhouetted figurative forms are always situated on a defined ground within a landscape with identifiable features. Working at a time when neighbouring clans were dispossessed of their lands through the creation of plantations, Somuk’s works assert continuing ancestral knowledge and connections to place. Gregory Dausi Moah (1911–88), another Naboin man, lived in Biroat and the nearby village of Mokanika. A self-taught artist, he was also inspired by tradition and exposed to new mediums by the nuns and priests of the Gagan mission. He was eventually appointed as the lead artist commissioned to build and decorate the local church and priests’ residence. 5 During the 1960s and early 1970s, Moah served on the Hutjena Local Government Council, established his own plantation business, and led a group of men commissioned to carve totemic poles for Aropa Airport. 6 After the death of his cousin–brother Kinum in 1972, Moah was appointed as a chief of his clan’s Tsuhana (clan house). Encouraged by Father Lukan, Moah built a new Tsuhana decorated extensively with paintings and carvings memorialising ancestor figures and clan stories. 7 The two drawings by Moah in APT9 were drawn in the 1970s, while he was living on Sohano Island and teaching carving, painting and weaving at the local high school. 8 These works, like the paintings decorating the Gagan church and the Tsuhana , include silhouetted figures clad in ceremonial ornamentation with distinctive designs and patterns. There is a sense of reflection in these drawings, which document the memory of fast-disappearing ceremonial practices. The final group of works was created as part of a project conducted in 2012 by the Papua New Guinea Red Cross Society, the University of Papua New Guinea and the International Committee of the Red Cross in the Autonomous Region of Bougainville. Shown reproductions of Somuk’s work, artists were invited to record their memories of the Bougainville crisis, 9 as well as their hopes for the future, using a reverse-painting technique known as fixé sous verre (painting under glass).