The Ninth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

59 ARTISTS Top: Kawage spearing the Australian first plane to PNG 2018 Below: Australia wokim nupela setelite 2018 Synthetic polymer paint on canvas / 77 x 118cm / Courtesy: The artist SIMON GENDE Kuman people Born 1969, Chimbu Province, Papua New Guinea Lives and works in Goroka, Papua New Guinea Working in the iconic naive style of his mentor and fellow Chimbu artist, the late Mathias Kauage, 1 Eastern Highlands painter Simon Gende documents moments of encounter and change in Papua New Guinea and neighbouring regions with unflinching honesty and humour. Many of his paintings revise and re-enact the past through a distinctively local idiom and context. Gende’s bold and colourful paintings in APT9 offer an idiosyncratic view of events or aspects of local culture, including recounting creation stories involving the iconic bird of paradise, the recent Australian gas shortage fiasco, the fantastical launch of an Australian satellite, and the artist’s own role as an advocate for Papua New Guinea culture for a global audience. Among this new body of work is a heartfelt tribute to Kauage, which was inspired by Gende’s visit to the Queensland Art Gallery, where he saw Vincent Namatjira’s paintings about his great-grandfather, the renowned watercolourist Albert Namatjira (1902–59). Gende identified strong parallels between Albert Namatjira and Mathias Kauage, both pioneering Indigenous artists who used introduced materials and painting techniques to record their experiences of Western contact and change. 2 Kawage spearing the Australian first plane to PNG 2018 features a young Kauage standing on a mountain overlooking his village, bow and arrow aimed at an aeroplane. To his eyes, the plane appeared to be a big white bird hovering menacingly overhead. When the plane landed, he feared that he had killed the bird and would get in trouble, so he hid from the group of officials who had gathered to meet it. Kauage himself painted versions of this scene, referring to it as the moment when he became aware of the overwhelming changes that would reshape life for Highlands peoples. 3 One of the few Papua New Guinean painters to reflect on historical moments in their work, Gende’s painting places Kauage into the canon of worthy subjects. Another of Gende’s more recent paintings documents an experience he had in Brisbane, which he dramatically described the following day as a ‘trip to hell and back’. 4 The strip(e) club 2017 is inscribed with the text ‘Mi ting mi stap long nupela planet’ (‘I think I have come to a new planet’) and depicts a Highlands man in full ceremonial bilas (ornamentation), who has stumbled into a bustling room of topless waitresses serving drinks and roast chicken to an all-male clientele. A television screen in the corner presides over the scene, the male announcer rendered in black and white and physically absent from the activity taking place. Perhaps not the vision the Gallery expected Gende would take away from his first trip to Australia, The strip(e) club pulls no punches, providing an important moment of reflection on this element of Australian culture. Gende’s work focuses on personal and collective stories in which the past is inextricably woven into the fabric of the present. Often referencing newspaper accounts and previously accepted historical evidence — anthropological, art historical and photographic — he exposes these sources as a mixture of facts that are collected, interpreted and presented in new combinations according to a particular external world view. Reflecting this view with biting humour and directness, Simon Gende creates a very different perspective. Ruth McDougall Endnotes 1 Mathias Kauage is considered one of the founding fathers of contemporary art in Papua New Guinea. From the same village as Gende, he worked from the early 1970s through to his death in 2003. 2 Simon Gende visited the ‘Namatjira Story’ display at QAGOMA in September 2017, where he encountered the work of Vincent and Albert Namatjira. At the time, the ownership of copyright for Albert Namatjira’s paintings — and the ongoing legal battle over the payment of royalties to the Namatjira family — was receiving extensive coverage in the Australian media. 3 See especially Mathias Kauage’s Marbles 1988. 4 Simon Gende, interview with Ruth McDougall, Brisbane, 28 September 2017.