Quarantine Islands & Fa'afafine - in the Manner of a Woman
Quarantine Islands
Fa'afafine - in the Manner of a Woman
Yuki Kihara
Milford Galleries Queenstown
18 Dowling Street, Dunedin
31 July - 21 September 2021
Yuki Kihara, Kamau Taurua Quarantine Island (2021), lenticular photograph
In a new series of her acclaimed lenticular photographs, inter-disciplinary artist Yuki Kihara (dressed in the guise of Salome) visits the four islands around Aotearoa New Zealand where people and animals with contagious diseases were once quarantined. Salome dressed in her signature Victorian mourning dress, travels across time and develops signature narratives which unite the various histories and hidden costs, the unspoken and forgotten stories of these islands with the circumstances of now and the covid pandemic. With both conceptual and artistic rigour Kihara continues to position and investigate the history of photography and the moving image of the lenticular process with the subject of colonialism in New Zealand and (by direct implication) the wider Pacific.
Yuki Kihara, Ulugali'i Samoa - Samoan Couple (2004/20), pigment print on paper
Accompanying the Quarantine Island lenticulars is the re-editioned Fa’afafine Series (2020). Acknowledged worldwide as a work of seminal importance, the subject of countless essays and feature publications, represented in collections of such significance as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, University of Cambridge Museum, Te Papa Tongarewa and Dame Jenny Gibbs, the Fa’afafine series is not simply a work of profound artistic importance delivered with significant political and social intent and complex, intersectional narratives but one that asserts the legitimacy of indigenous culture and diverse gender identities.
Visually literate and layered, explicitly referencing Manet’s Olympia (universally acknowledged as one of if not the most scandalous painting of the nineteenth century) in which Manet depicts a nude prostitute attended by a black servant, Kihara turns the work inside out by altering all the hierarchies and preconceptions of it.
Kihara who identifies herself as a Fa’afafine (Samoan ‘third gender’) uses her body as an artistic material and device of the triptych form as a sequence of subtle reveals, where Kihara through another guise unapologetically returns the gaze to the viewer. In that manner, Kihara flips attention back onto the assumptions and precepts of European art, cultural attitudes and binary thinking.
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