Yuki Kihara

Yuki Kihara is an artist and curator with very specific point of view. Born of a Samoan mother and Japanese father and identifying as Fa'afafine, she has always had to fight for her sense of place. She is outspoken, passionate, and tenacious, she is both outside and inside the system, changing things from within.

‘Whakatū freezing works, Heretaunga’ (2017) From the series ‘Te taenga mai o Salome [The arrival of Salome]’ (2017)Courtesy of Yuki Kihara, MTG Hawke’s Bay Tai Ahuriri and Milford Galleries Dunedin

I first met Yuki in the early days of studying our fashion design degree together, aged 18. After years apart, as she has a habit of gaining interesting and often farflung residencies, we find ourselves in the same place at the same time once more to do this interview and shoot her portrait for Black.

Internationally her work is considered thoughtful and provocative, a distinctive voice in World Art. Her latest undertakings, one on each side of the Tasman see her as a curator working to amplify another’s story and then as an artist revisiting a key character that she adopts to shed light on messages of her own.

Where were you born?

I was born Samoa and grew up moving between Apia, Jakarta, Osaka, and various parts of Aotearoa. I first arrived in Aotearoa / Niu Sila / New Zealand from Samoa as a teenager, when my brother and I began attending an all-boys boarding school in Te Ūpoko o te Ika Wellington. Before arriving into Aotearoa I knew nothing about Maori people or the Treaty of Waitangi. It was during boarding school I learnt that Samoan and te reo Maori were very similar so I asked my family if I could take reo Maori classes and they said no because ‘there’s no future in it’.

I was also surrounded by a predominantly Pakeha environment where fellow students often spoke about how there were no ‘real full-blooded Maoris left’, but they loved performing the haka, which I thought was hypocritical. I often heard ignorant comments about Maori people from both Samoan and Pakeha communities (and still do), but I refused to believe them. And besides, at that time I was (and still am) being criticised for being a fresh from Samoa, of mixed race and a Fa’afaine. There were times I just wanted to leave to escape all the negativity but my family continued to push me to settle in Aotearoa so I could have a better future. I found it really scary as a teenager at that time. It was a struggle just to survive.

After high school, you were initially drawn to studying fashion, how did you discover art? What was it that drew you to the idea of being an artist and no longer a designer?

I actually wanted to enrol and study to become an artist but my parents opposed it so instead I studied fashion design and technology at Wellington Polytechnic (now Massey University). Upon reflection I realised the clothes I was producing were more like wearable art using cloth as a sculptural material. This wasn’t reflective of training students to be more ready-to-wear so they were industry-ready after graduation. You could say the first group of artists I studied were fashion designers: Rei Kawakubo, Issey Miyake, Lamine Kouyaté (Xuly.Bet), Jean- Paul Gaultier, and John Galliano. I was interested in designers who questioned, challenged and subverted standards of beauty. I also saw fashion shows as a form of theatre and mise-enscène where the models were actors in masquerade, despite the fact that they’re primarily used as a marketing tool to sell merchandise where the actual profit is being made via cosmetics and handbags. As I’d also grown up exposed simultaneously to both Samoan and Japanese culture I approached the concept of fashion and dress differently than my other classmates. I still often make my own clothes and draw on fashion dramaturgy in my art practice now.

What draws you to a context when you’re making work?

For me, it’s the idea that informs the medium. So whatever medium best expresses and does justice to the idea is what I choose to work with. It’s about my audience and how they experience life in general.

You have led a very independent career; do you consider yourself outside of the gallery system?

Yes, I do. I’ve always felt like I’ve had to work harder in order to be recognised as a serious artist. I recently came to grips with the fact that the international reception of my work is very different from how it is received in Aotearoa. In Aotearoa I feel undermined as a Pacific artist with a migrant background in an art world structured to elevate artists who are white cis-gendered men. I’m sometimes accused of selling out as an artist of colour and being a Fa’afafine because there are those in Aotearoa who think it’s not possible that I would draw critical attention based on the merit of my work alone. These are just some of the issues I’ve had to deal with in the gallery system that places value on art based on a western hierarchical system, separating art from life by making it a capitalist commodity in our society. As a result I’ve been making an effort to decolonise the way I work in the hope that it will make an impact in the gallery system, even in a small way.

Is it important to have a gallery represent you?

I don’t think there is a right or wrong way for an artist to exist in the world, and that includes whether they have gallery representation or not. At this point in my career I mainly need a dealer gallery to assist with admin due to growing demand. Before I had a dealer I had to oversee the packing, crating, freighting – including import and export - for all my artworks nationally and internationally including all the paperwork that went with it, which is very time consuming and took me from making art. That’s just a fraction of what I do as an artist (without even touching on funding applications, research and development, production and post-production of artworks, production meetings, contracts, residencies, commissions, lectures and workshops, public speaking engagements, international travel and numerous projects running concurrently at any given time) I live a very busy life, often quite stressful at times, so having a gallery rep helps take a load off my shoulders. I’ve learnt over the years that it’s best for me to work with people who understand my work and the direction I want to take in my practice, compared to being one of a repeat roster of rotating exhibitions. That doesn’t elevate me in new directions I want to take my art.

Famously your series “Fa’afafine: In a Manner of a Woman” was shown at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2008: a series of nude self-portraits. How did this work and the exhibition come about?

I don’t call them self-portraits as I’m masquerading as characters other than myself. As Yuki I wouldn’t dare do many of the things you see in my photographs! But by assuming a role I’m more prepared to take on the challenge in becoming someone else. I met with a curator from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I think, in 2006. They had come to watch my dance production presented at Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac in Paris. After the show we were backstage and the conversation started from there. There hadn’t been a contemporary art exhibition from the Pacific at The Met prior to my solo show there, so it was great given that the Pacific was a somewhat underrated region in contemporary World Art.

When did you begin curating?

I became a curator because I wanted to be a catalyst in providing a platform for marginalised voices and ideas to be heard and made visible in the public sphere. I wanted to find other ways I could convey my ideas further. My first curatorial project was in 2002 with a group show entitled dTail, co-curated with artist Ani O’Neill at Auckland’s Mataora Gallery during the Ponsonby Fashion Festival and supported by Creative New Zealand.

Do you feel it’s also important to self-identify as a queer or Pasifika? Not at all, if there is such a thing as a Pasifika subject matter then what is a Pakeha subject matter?

I see myself first and foremost as an artist and every other label is secondary.

Having said that, is what you’re doing creating visibility for both communities? Is that important to you?

Yes, I felt that there were things that needed to be said, that hadn’t been given the platform, especially from indigenous peoples within the queer community often dominated by the point of view of gay white men.

I curated a group show about Fa’afafine that coincided with the 2007 Love Life Fono hosted by the NZ Aids Foundation. I also cocurated with Australian Aboriginal curator Jenny Fraser a group exhibition “Hand in Hand” featuring over 30 indigenous artists from Oceania, jointly presented between Performance Apace and Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-Operative during 2008 Sydney Pride Week.

Your latest curatorial project ”Project Banaba” with Banaban scholar and artist Katerina Teaiwa has just shown at Carriageworks in Sydney. How did you meet the artist and become the curator for this piece?

I met Katerina in 2004, after seeing ‘Kainga Tahi Kainga Rua’ at Wellington’s ADAM Art Gallery which brought her research together with the artistic direction and work of Brett Graham, and we kept in touch. I initially began to pursue research and development for ‘Project Banaba’ with with Shelley Jahnke, Katerina and her scholar sister Teresia in 2013. We spoke to a Pākeha agriculture lecturer in Palmerston North about how farms across the country were guilty of benefiting from phosphate extracted from the island of Banaba. The story is that from 1900 to 1980 the British Phosphate Commissioners – owned collectively by Australia, NZ and Britain – mined Banaba, in what is now the Republic of Kiribati. The phosphate was manufactured into superphosphate fertiliser and topdressed onto farms across Australia and NZ. As a result of the extensive mining operation, the island was rendered uninhabitable and the Banabans were relocated to the island of Rabi in Fiji. The lecturer in question replied to us by saying “It was worth the sacrifice to feed the rest of the world”. And sadly our NZ funding application didn’t work out. I knew this project was too good to drop in the ‘failed’ folder however and I was still pissed off at that ignorant comment, so two years later, I regrouped with Katerina about exhibiting at Carriageworks in Sydney where we would focus more on Australia’s mining history in Banaba. In 2016, on Katerina’s advice, I went to Geelong in Victoria to inspect one of factories that processed the phosphate. The sheer size of it helped me realise the enormity of the operation, and the circulation of Banaban phosphate ending up in our food chain including Samoa, where often eaten NZ-export off-cut mutton flaps partly contribute to a 90% obesity rate. Katerina is doing a brilliant job as an artist and she should leave academia and be one - or at least do both. It’s her calling, the ideas and research translated so well as an installation.

And now a new series of your own work ‘Te taenga mai o Salome [The arrival of Salome]’ has just opened at MTG Hawke’s Bay. You first created and depicted the Salome character in Samoa in 2002, what brought her back?

I always wanted to produce a project that would shed light on different facets of Samoa by visiting other places that would form as a mirror to its history. ‘Te taenga mai o Salome’ will be one of several iterations where Salome travels in order to draw transnational connections to and from Samoa. In a previous 2013 series, we see Salome at the departure lounge of the Faleolo International Airport in Upolu, Samoa. Locals have mixed reactions to this place because it’s where we greet or farewell friends and family, often starting a new life in a diaspora.

In Heretaunga, it was important to me that the project spoke to local audiences first before anyone else. As I also engage in performing arts, it was natural to me to look into the history of performing arts in the region, particularly from the local iwi, Ngati Kahungunu. I learnt about the late Tama Tūranga Huata ONZM, who was Ngāti Kahungunu and Ngāti Porou, and is considered a central guru in the renaissance of Maori performing arts. I was also interested in his artistic cross-cultural approaches, as he studied African history and dance, and was artistic director of the Takitimu Festival.

He integrated Tikanga Māori into pan-Pasifika aesthetics: culturally and spiritually linking his people to others across the Moana Pacific through the ancestral journey of the Takitimu waka, believed to have carried the ancestors of the Ngāti Kahungunu people from various parts of the Moana — including Sāmoa. When I saw Huata reaching out to Samoa, I felt that in return I needed to reach back to him as a Samoan, and how I was going to do that became the question that helped establish what my project was going to be. Salome was the perfect character for this because she directs our focus to various issues at hand, whether they are cultural, social, spiritual, economic or political. The audience engages with the world through her lens, and where Salome had visited prior to arrival in Heretaunga gives us clues to what she could be thinking or feeling, as she considers Paul Gauguin’s questions: “Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?”

Who else in the art sphere do you admire?

My sister’s pencil drawing of our family dog; my brother’s acrylic paintings of people; and my mum’s watercolour painting of flowers growing in her garden.

What’s next, Yuki? What are your hopes for your future?

To be happy.

‘Apple orchard, Heretaunga’ (2017) From the series ‘Te taenga mai o Salome [The arrival of Salome]’ (2017)Courtesy of Yuki Kihara, MTG Hawke’s Bay Tai Ahuriri and Milford Galleries Dunedin

Words CHRIS LORIMER

Photography SCOTT LOWE at DEBUT