Yuki Kihara, Artist, Samoa
The Western vision of the Pacific and Polynesia as a lost Eden, peopled by ‘noble savages’ and ‘dusky maidens’ living in harmony with ‘mother nature’ and ‘moral purity’ untouched by the corruption of modern, capitalist society has been a subject matter for many artists, among others, including French post-Impressionist artist Paul Gauguin who travelled to the Pacific in search for an idyllic paradise coupled with insatiable appetite for mystery, erotic and the exotic settling in Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands already occupied by the French colonial administration during the 19th century. Centuries later, Pacific people continue to be seen through the lens of Gauguin’s paintings as a blanket stereotype as part of an on-going process of orientalism in the Pacific region. Kihara’s illustrated lecture entitled Vision of Salome, centers on works she has produced in the last decade or so where she features herself in the guise of ‘Salome’ – a Samoan woman in Victorian mourning dress appearing in across video, live performance and photographic mediums while subverting historical cross-cultural representations of Pacific people, unpacking the myth of the Pacific as paradise and critiques the imposition of European concepts of gender and sexuality onto colonized peoples.