95suspendedbetweentwoworld-views—Fa’aSamoa,
and the New Zealand way of doing things—in the
wake of globalisation.
The exhibition’s title ‘Kamoan Mine’ is an
expression coined by the artist to account for his own
sense of identity as a Kiwi-born Samoan, one whose
parents emigrated from Samoa to Auckland during
the economic boom times of the 1960s, when the New
Zealand government was actively recruiting large
numbers of migrants from the Pacific Islands to meet a
labour shortage. He is a memorialist of this odyssey.
Mangere Central, where his family relocated,
was a recently constructed dormitory suburb of
mass-produced housing intended for working-class
people; in the 1970s, it became a kind of ghetto, albeit
one filled with vitality and activity, and one well-
planned, with a swimming pool, sports fields, church,
library, schools, and with the maunga of Mangere
Mountain looming above Mangere Lawn Cemetery.
This is where Leleisi’uao spent his formative years,
beneath the flight path of Auckland Airport on a
former wetland, a drained marshy landscape not far
from Manukau Harbour and the oxidation ponds,
a place of autumn mists and long summer days,
where there was a dissonance between the Samoan
spoken at home and in church and the English learnt
at school. In a way, what the village of Cookham was
for the British artist Stanley Spencer, so the suburb of
Mangere has been for Andy Leleisi’uao: a wellspring
of inspiration.
Leleisi’uao’s main focus is on the ontology of
Samoanness, the essentialism of identity politics,
philosophical notions of being. He moves around
these subjects in agile fashion, probing and testing
propositions, arguments, tenets, ideals. His early
works in this show demonstrate a formidable visceral
energy as they seek to create allegorical depictions
of the Samoan migrant condition to stand in for the
universalism of the human condition.
Extruded heads, inchoate, atavistic, convulsed
as if in the grip of birth pangs, struggle to emerge
from storms of oil paint. They owe something to
1980s neo-expressionism, but are altogether more
anxious, fraught, tightly wound, expressing not just
personal angst but cultural collision as an existential
threat. This is evident in I don’t get it (1997), where the
anguished central figure, in two minds, is running a
gauntlet of taunts about powerlessness, mortification,
humiliation. There’s a writhing quality to the very
paintwork, as in Cultural Strangulation (1997). Flesh
is being twisted, stretched, contorted, choked.
The atmosphere of sinister oppressiveness owes
something to the Weimar Republic expressionism
of Max Beckmann and Otto Dix, and what is being
repressed or transgressed is made explicit in Blueness
of my Tapacloth (1997), the media-driven incriminating
litany of which is all about making Pacific Islanders
feel afflicted and uncomfortable in their own skins,
as if everything they do will bring accusations that
they are wrong and need to learn their place. The
rawness here and in Towards the Niu Millennium (1997)
are protest art informed by art-historical tradition,
from Ralph Hotere to John Pule, but also informed
by rock and rap music, from Herbs to Dam Native.
It expresses brown political consciousness-raising in
a way that has affinities with the Polynesian Panther
movement of the 1970s. (It’s also notable that just as
the expressionist painter Rudolf Gopas was a mentor
for Tony Fomison, so Fomison was a mentor for the
Samoan artist Fatu Feu’u, who in turn was a mentor
for Leleisi’uao in the 1990s.)
There is a sense of laceration and puzzled
ambivalence about much of Leleisi’uao’s early work,
enacting doubt and inner conflict as it struggles with
two contradictory concepts: the intense individualism
encouraged by New Zealand society, and the intense
collectivism encouraged by traditional Samoan(opposite) ANDY LELEISI’UAO Prince of Mangere 2015
Acrylic on canvas, 1500 x 1200 mm.
(Photograph: Max White)
(right) ANDY LELEISI’UAO Crashed Presbyterian 2007
Oil on canvas, 760 x 600 mm.
(Photograph: Max White)
(below) ANDY LELEISI’UAO Cultural Strangulation 1997
Oil on board, 950 x 700 mm.
(Photograph: Max White)