ShigeyukiKihara

"My existence as a Fa'afine person goes against every thread which makes up the social fabric which is essentially western based"
 - Shigeyukikihara

ShigeyukiKihara is a contemporary artist who is the first New Zealander to hold a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum Art, New York. Kihara portrays herself as a fa'afine who was born in Samoa and her father is a Japanese. Kiharas self portraits show provocative poses that portray colonial images of Polynesian women as sexual objects.

Form:

-Central Composition
-Deep Depth of Field
- Staged Studio Photography yet creates an illusion of it being set in the 'natural' world
- Traditional woven mats and exotic plants
- Colonial Velvet Couch
- Strong use of vertical lines
- Lines and Pattern (Mats)
- Tryptych


Content:

In this image Kihara uses her own body to reconstruct the colonial gaze preserved as "ethnographic imagery". She undermines the scheme of Western classifications including gender by portraying both a male and female subject. From the viewpoint of European Art History, a rich series of association springs to mind. Firstly, a beautiful woman elegantly perched on a divan, elbow resting on a pillow evokes a long tradition of representations of women in European painting, such as Jacques Louis David . The pose and minimal garments is what enables this identification. The "Punctum" transforms our reading of this photograph; without the cap, she is just a naked woman provocatively displaying prosetrior. The key role of this garment in facilitating the orientalist fantasy points to the importance of the grass skirt in Kihara's photographs. Present in one photograph and absent in the other two the skirt becomes a full crum for interpretation. The skirt draws attention to the "ethnic" nature of the subject and brings to mind related popular photographic images of "Dusky Maidens," such as A.M Brodziak and CO.

Context:

 By using her self to portray this powerful idea Kihara's work provides a critique of Western binary norms of sexuality and gender onto indigenous Pacific peoples. Just as ethnographic photography provided a limited and distorted stereo typical representation of non western people. Kihara draws upon her status as being located "in the or space between men and women" in exploring these issues. In this she builds upon the concept of as articulated by Albert Wendt: "It is the space between, the betweenness, not empty space, not space that separates but space that relates, that holds separate entities and things together in the unity that is all, the space that is context, giving  meaning to things" (Wendt 1996, 18-19)

Similar "Dusky maidens"

Fig. 2  Jacques-Louis David (French, 1748-1825), Juliette Recamier,
1800. Oil on canvas. Musee du Louvre, Paris

http://athomeinthenineteenthcentury.blogspot.co.nz/2012/07/grecian-couches.html