128 | MAY/JUN 2017 | ISSUE 103
HONOLULU
Various locationsa life-sized diptych of his own tattooed body,
placed in the center of the room as though on an
altar, replaces that of Jesus; in the latter, the bodies
in Jacques-Louis David’s “Bonaparte Crossing the
Alps” series (1801–05) are replaced with those from
the Pacific, and French attire morphs into Pacific
garb. Kihara’s Maui Descending a Staircase II (After
Duchamp) (2015) and images from the series “A
Study of a Samoan Savage” (2015) are photographic
prints in which the body of the Polynesian
deity Māui is treated as a lab specimen whose
anatomical features are measured with 19th-
century anthropometric tools. The postcolonial
statement here is obvious, yet these remain
images of brown bodies seen through a Western
aesthetic gaze.
Other works attempt to recover natural and
precolonial sensibilities. Honolulu-based artist
Jane Chang Mi’s installation, The Eyes of the Gods
(2017), projects video and audio feeds recorded
underwater over a floor of sand, to show us a
different version of what we now call Pearl Harbor.
Hawaiian fiber artist Marques Hanalei Marzan’s
‘A‘ahu Kino Lau (2017) honors four major Hawaiian
gods by clothing mannequins—placeholders for
their amorphous bodies—in handmade textiles
whose colors represent the gods’ respective realms.
These are correctives to commodifying histories,
although in the worldliness conjured by the
Biennial’s “middle of now,” they feel like misplaced
anthropological pieces. Fellow Honolulu-based
artist Chris Ritson engages with the island as living
material in The Corallinales (2017), a biogenerative
painting of algae scraped from local beach detritus.
The painting, which hangs inside a tank of water,
continues to grow.
Māori artist Lisa Reihana comes closer to
achieving the Biennial’s vision of communicating
both the indigenous and the universal. Her two-
channel video installation, Tai Whetuki – House
of Death, Redux (2016), presents a warrior’s
journey after death to the underworld. The
video is rendered in an eerie blue dusk, with aThe main exhibition site for the first Honolulu
Biennial was a hollowed-out warehouse, which just
a year ago housed a sportswear chain retailer, then
a Halloween costume store, and will soon host chic
cafés and boutiques. The space stands a few blocks
between where the Ola Ka ‘Ilima Artspace Lofts
will be erected to provide low-income housing for
artists in the community, and where the annual
Pow! Wow! mural festival has transformed the
walls of former warehouses into a neighborhood
chock full of surrealist graffiti. Now, the Biennial
has entered the scene and staked its own claim on
what Kaka‘ako, also known as O‘ahu’s “Third City,”
should look like.
The Biennial’s inaugural theme was “Middle of
Now | Here,” contending with the idea that Hawai‘i
sits in the “middle of nowhere.” The exhibition
statement by curatorial director Fumio Nanjo takes
up a challenge by quoting from the last lines of a
landmark essay by Epeli Hau‘ofa: “[The] sea is our
pathway to each other and to everyone else [.. .]
the sea is our most powerful metaphor, the ocean
is in us.” These words, first shared during a talk
in 1997, were meant to form a regional identity
for the Pacific peoples whose island nations often
still are the dispensable appendages of military
occupation and neocolonialism, islands too often
seen in terms of the larger nations around them.
Nanjo appropriates Hau‘ofa’s humanist vision by
expanding the indigenous “we” into the first world
“we” of the Biennial, which explains a tension
between some of the artworks and the exhibition’s
stated vision.
Consider the works of Samoan artists Greg
Semu and Yuki Kihara. Semu’s After Hans Holbein
the Younger – The Body of the Dead Christ (2016)
and Battle of the Noble Savage 1 (2007) are both
photographs rendered to reconfigure eminent
paintings from European history. In the former,HONOLULU BIENNIAL
MIDDLE OF NOW | HERE