Samoa Contemporary

Samoacontemporary celebrates the best of Samoan art in New
Zealand today — its energy and vitality, its originality and diversity.
The exhibition also showcases the strength of Samoan art within
the New Zealand contemporary art scene. While Samoan artists
have exhibited nationally and internationally under the umbrella of
contemporary Pacific art, this large-scale exhibition gives centre
stage for the first time to artists of Samoan origin living and working
in New Zealand.

Of the 17 artists included in this exhibition, only three are Samoanborn.
All 17 live in New Zealand cities, so their urban reality is far
removed from their roots in Samoa. As ‘inter-islanders’, their work
expresses the complexity of their lives as New Zealand Samoan
artists for whom Samoa is already ‘somewhere else’. This experience
gives them an outside-inside perspective on their own culture. While
they have access to the rich cultural heritage of their ancestors, they
also bring analytical and investigative tools honed by their personal
life outside that culture and its home place. They are able to look
at their culture with fresh eyes. Distance gives them freedom to
explore, question and experiment with contemporary expressions
of Samoan art. As Andy Leleisi‘uao says, ‘The uniqueness we share
together is that we were not born in Samoa. It is this dislocation
and displacement that separates us from both Island-born and New
Zealand-born papalagi artists. We differ in context and content.’1

In their various ways, these artists are articulating a new urbanbased
visual language that draws on their Samoan heritage and their
communal experience of Samoan culture in New Zealand, as well
as their wider New Zealand experience. Imported Samoan culture
has intersected with urban New Zealand to create a new way of
seeing that is urgent, colourful, reflective, provocative and satiric.
Fresh, innovative and often irreverent, their work explores the rich
territory between the island and the urban. It is this synthesis of the
customary and contemporary that gives the work its uniqueness.

Why Samoa? Why is Samoan culture exerting such a growing
influence in New Zealand in the 21st century? Without doubt,
the connections between the two cultures are deep-rooted
historically. While traditional Samoan culture is being remoulded
to fit within a contemporary New Zealand context, New Zealand
culture is also changing as people here consciously embrace
and project a more distinctly Pacific identity. Increasingly, New
Zealand is positioning itself as a Pacific place, and these New
Zealand Samoan artists are producing work that reflects and
embodies the feel and look of that place. Samoan artists are
helping New Zealanders to see and articulate New Zealand’s
future as a Pacific nation.

Samoans have of course, had a significant influence on New
Zealand’s cultural life for some time — in sport, politics, film,
design and art. New Zealanders have embraced Samoan New
Zealand culture on television (Bro’town), in film (Sione’s Wedding
and No.2), in theatre (The Laughing Samoans and The Naked
Samoans), in dance (Black Grace), in opera (Jonathan Lemalu)
and in music (Nesian Mystic, King Kapisi, and Fat Freddy’s
Drop). According to Karen Stevenson, ‘There is no doubt that it is
the ability of Pacific Islanders to be self-critical and irreverent and
to laugh at themselves which provides the support that one finds
amongst and for Pacific Arts practice in New Zealand.’2

The story of the success of contemporary Samoan art in New
Zealand begins with Fatu Feu‘u who immigrated to New Zealand
in 1966. Feu‘u, along with Michel Tuffery and John Ioane, helped
to create Pacific art as a distinctive movement in New Zealand
in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This first wave of Pacific artists
often felt marginalised and stereotyped by the popular perception
of the Pacific Islands as a paradise. Four decades later, a new
wave of New Zealand Samoan artists is thriving in New Zealand.
Many have proven adaptable to the international as well as the
national art scene. Lonnie Hutchinson, Fatu Feu‘u, Graham
Fletcher, Lorene Taurerewa and Michel Tuffery have all been
recipients of major international residencies, and Greg Semu
has just completed the first ever residency at the Musée du quai
Branly in Paris.

Contemporary Pacific art has been launched on the international
scene in the 21st century with three major exhibitions
— Paradise Now which opened in New York in 2004, Pasifika
Styles at the University of Cambridge in England in 2006 and Dateline:
Contemporary Art from the Pacific in Berlin in 2007. Lonnie
Hutchinson, Edith Amituanai, Michel Tuffery, Andy Leleisi‘uao, Niki
Hastings-McFall and John Ioane are among the artists who took part
in these important exhibitions.

The works in this exhibition share a number of broad themes
— in particular the realities of migration, adaptation, identity and
displacement. While Fatu Feu‘u’s work emphasises the need for
cultural continuity, Niki Hastings-McFall’s and Graham Fletcher’s
re-evaluates perceptions and stereotypes of the Pacific. John Ioane
has resolved his identity as a New Zealander of Samoan heritage
and he consciously avoids the stereotype of ‘ethnic looking stuff’ in
his work. He describes his work as an interplay between the spirit
of traditional Samoa and the culture of contemporary New Zealand.
Andy Leleisi‘uao acknowledges the social consequences of migration
and integration. Greg Semu explores historical themes relating to
the colonisation of the Pacific. Shigeyuki Kihara’s work is about
reclaiming identities and ethnic histories.

The importance and yet the ambivalence of home is also a key
theme. Greg Semu said, ‘Being born in New Zealand of Samoan
heritage, I often find myself alienated from both societies.’ Andy
Leleisi‘uao has invented the word Kamoan to describe ‘New
Zealand born Samoans who didn’t want to get marginalised as
Pacific Islanders and stereotyped as Island-born.’ Lily Laita speaks
of constantly being asked ‘Can you speak Samoan?’ when people
discover she is New Zealand-born: ‘When I say “Yes and no”, they
reply, “Then you are not Samoan.”’

Many of the artists have a multicultural background, including
Michel Tuffery, Nanette Lela‘ulu, Niki Hastings-McFall, Lily Laita,
Graham Fletcher and Lorene Taurerewa, and their work sometimes
reflects their cross-cultural heritage. New Zealanders, they are
comfortable describing themselves as New Zealand Samoan artists.
The majority are professional artists living in Auckland. Apart from
Fatu Feu‘u, all have trained at art schools in New Zealand.

The exhibition Samoacontemporary celebrates the impact of these
contemporary New Zealand Samoan artists on the New Zealand
visual arts scene. It also reveals the significance of their work within
the current renaissance of Samoan art and culture.