You might have been reading history wrong. Think about what happens when an artist sets sail in search for the “primitive” and when a land celebrating gender non-conformity is put under a colonized lens. Turning the pages back to the French colony of Tahiti where reputed painter Paul Gauguin takes on documenting the state and biologist Charles Darwin argues for conformity to western culture through his findings.
Gender Expression in Sāmoan culture
The Polynesian community of Tahiti has cultivated a culture throughout their history where gender expression is one’s pride. Sāmoan culture has been practicing four genders: tāne, fafine, fa’atama and fa’afafine. The gender roles of the Sāmoan are not reliant on their sex, but on how they choose to express their genders. For example, the individuals assigned male at birth can choose to identify as Fa’afafine and continue to function in society without any counteractions.
Gauguin’s Version of Tahiti
When French artist Paul Gauguin set sail to Tahiti in 1891, he brought with him the desire to stray away from a society contaminated by Europe. However, after 63 days of travel from Marseille, he reached Tahiti and found it to be a “Pacific copy”. The issue here was the expectation of an untamed state that he had sought in Tahiti and which influenced his art. He found that the place did not fulfil the ideas he held for a land away from Western civilization. In an attempt to capture the purity of Polynesian culture, his paintings show sexualized versions of individuals who were merely a part of the Sāmoan society.
At the Whitworth gallery on Oxford road, artist Yuki Kihara displays a collection that plays round the Westernised depictions of Polynesian culture. She photographs clear distinctions between the overly sexualized versions of Sāmoan people and the reality they live in. She uses the copies of Gauguin paintings to align it with photographs of Tahiti taken by her to leave the content for us to decipher.
Narratives Side-by-Side
Darwin in Paradise Camp is a collection of multi-media that expands over visual and audio creations. Her work is a juxtaposition of the paintings of Paul Gauguin with photographs taken by her. She studied Sāmoan photography for 20 years and realized that the people, especially women, were portrayed in an overly-sexual manner and the essence of the four genders in Sāmoan culture was often misjudged.
As you enter the exhibit, the stark purple engulfs you as you are met with self-portraits of Kihara that are a play on the running gender vs sex discussion. Moving ahead, a personal favorite is the Vārchive on the walls. This is an archival curation of materials spanning over 33 works, and it reflects Kihara’s Sāmoan background and provides an accurate storytelling of it. ‘Vā’, meaning space between things, joins hands with ‘archive’ and becomes the name for this piece on the wall where you’ll find passports, photographs, letters and more items that elucidate authenticity of the Polynesian culture which has been bent around western perspectives in the past.
Decolonizing Art
Another western figure in focus of this exhibit is Charles Darwin, a biologist, who claimed sexual diversity in animals was unnatural. Kihara sets apart the findings of Darwin through theatrical enactments and visual substances to reverberate the non-conformist nature of the Sāmoan society. Your eyes are trained to travel, but this exhibit will fixate them to one work of art and you will engross your minds in comprehending the decades of misjudgment endured by the Sāmoan people.
The purpose of this exhibition is to vividly challenge the western adaption of Polynesian culture through the eyes of a native. The differences in language, colors, figures and strokes is quite evident once pointed out. Yuki Kihara plays to her strength by using wit and action in delivering this message from a decolonized mind.
This exhibit is free to explore and Whitworth’s proximity to campus makes it the perfect palette cleanse you need after back-to-back lectures. You can catch Darwin in Paradise Camp until 1st March 2026. Take this chance to fix the tint on the glasses we see the world with and explore Tahiti through the eyes of Kihara.
