Kiwi Samoan Art Comes of Age
International Recognition Growing for Pacific Islands Urban Blend
Vibrant contemporary art with traditional influences by Samoan artists living in New Zealand may soon exhibit at an art gallery near you.
Artists of Samoan descent trained and living in New Zealand are making their way on the world stage.
A current exhibition at Pataka Museum in Porirua, New Zealand, features the work of 17 of these artists. New Zealand Samoan work has also been on display (under the rubric of contemporary Pacific Art) in three major exhibitions since 2004, in New York, Cambridge and Berlin. Several New Zealand Samoan artists have been awarded significant international residencies, with Greg Semu named the first resident at the Musee du Quay Branly in Paris.
So what makes this work so special? According to Samoa Contemporary, a booklet accompanying the Pataka exhibition curated by Helen Kedgley and Bob Maysmor, the artists have an “outside-in” perspective on their own culture, and can thus bring an analytical perspective to their cultural heritage. The booklet describes the work as “urgent, colourful, reflective, provocative and satiric.”
The themes of identity and adaptation often so important to immigrant artists are interpreted here mainly by the children of those immigrants, settled in one of the countries that colonised their homeland. Only three of the 17 artists are Samoan-born. Many of the paintings have political and social themes. A work by Siliga David Setoga features stacked apple boxes (ready for export) labelled “influenza”. The “enza” logo is used by the New Zealand Apple and Pear Marketing Board, and influenza, carried from New Zealand on the ship Talune in 1918, was responsible for the deaths of an estimated 7500 Samoans.
In a similarly satiric vein, Supplement Letters to Warm Up the Rain by Andy Leleisi'uao features a working-class Samoan man being pressured (physically pushed) by his wife to learn the English alphabet, with both partners depicted as wind-up dolls.
Roots of New Zealand Samoan Art
According to Sean Mallon in his 2002 Samoan Art and Artists: O Measina a Samoa (Nelson: Craig Potton Publishing), “painting is not recorded as being a strong feature of the Samoan arts”. Mallon’s comprehensive visual account includes artistic forms ranging from canoe building to Samoan tattoo art. However, Samoan art has always been innovative, and Mallon argues that customary categories of traditional and contemporary art can be confining. Even the notion of fa'asamoa itself, Samoan cultural values and practices, has evolved alongside its political and social context.
Mallon dates the distinctive growth of Pasifika Art in New Zealand to the early 1980s, building on the renaissance in Maori art. Fatu Feu'u, John Ioane and Michel Tuffery are names associated with those early years. At the beginning, one of the concerns of the artists was to convey the truth that, while cultural traditions and roots were critical to Pacific people in New Zealand, the “island paradise” ideal was in some ways a stereotype.
The emergence of Samoan New Zealand visual arts as a branch with its own identity parallels the success of Samoan New Zealanders in film, television, music, dance, poetry and other creative endeavours. An example from the world of literature is the performance poet Tusiata Avia. In her collection Wild Dogs Under My Skirt, among hard-hitting poems exploring her identity as a New Zealander of Samoan descent, Avia dedicates a poem to her grandfather, a member of the Mau resistance movement against New Zealand’s administration of Samoa in the first part of the 20th century. Mallon links performance poetry to fagogo, the Samoan story-telling tradition that involves a narrator performing a type of theatre in front of small groups of people.
What is clear is that contemporary Samoan New Zealand artists are drawing upon a special blend of influences to produce work that will be appreciated within the South Pacific and beyond. The evolution of this branch of Pacific Art is something that art lovers will be keen to follow.
