Art New Zealand – August 2019

94

Memorialist of the Migrant Odyssey

Andy Leleisi’uao’s Kamoan Mine

DAVID EGGLETON

At night, the golden arches of McDonald’s great M
glow over the flatlands of Mangere Central and its
studded navel the Mangere Town Centre, where
ghosts of moonwalking hip-hop kids of the 1980s
still linger. Mangere is the suburb in which Andy
Leleisi’uao grew up, and it’s the neighbourhood
he still calls home. Just along the motorway, across
the Onehunga Bridge, in Hillsborough, is the Pah
Homestead, where the survey exhibition Kamoan
Mine, curated by Ben Bergman, displays key
works made by Leleisi’uao between 1995 and 2019.
Andy Leleisi’uao, a polemical, idiosyncratic talent,

possessing prodigious graphic gifts, emerged out of

Mangere as part of a new wave of significant New

Zealand artists of Pacific Island heritage in the mid-

1990s. An outstanding art student at Mangere College

in the 1980s, he left high school early to help pay the

family house mortgage, and got a job in a factory.

As a big exhibition shoehorned into four or five

rooms, and jostled up against assorted bric-a-brac in

the Pah Homestead foyer, Kamoan Mine is something

of a higgledy-piggledy jumble, but nonetheless it

serves as an impressive testament to the potency and

fecundity of Leleisi’uao’s production across a variety

of media. Paintings, drawings and sculptures are

hung or grouped in series and thematic clusters to

establish the persistence of this artist’s obsessions and

central concerns. In sum, it is an encyclopedic display

of sign-making, a panoptic exercise in aestheticising

what’s beautiful or good or bad or ugly about being

AndyLeleisi’uaoKamoanMine

TSBWallaceArtsCentrePahHomestead,Auckland

1 May–14July,curatedbyBenBergman