{"id":19479,"date":"2025-11-06T14:16:41","date_gmt":"2025-11-06T14:16:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artjournalstg.wpenginepowered.com\/?p=19479"},"modified":"2025-11-06T14:16:42","modified_gmt":"2025-11-06T14:16:42","slug":"reappropriating-gauguin-in-contemporary-polynesian-photography","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/?p=19479","title":{"rendered":"Reappropriating Gauguin in Contemporary Polynesian Photography"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Emma Amos, Tightrope<\/em>, 1994, acrylic on canvas with African fabric borders and photo transfer, 82 x 58 in. (208.3 x 147.3\u2009cm), Minneapolis Institute of Art, Gift of funds from Mary and Bob Mersky and the Ted and Dr. Roberta Mann Foundation Endowment Fund, 2020.43 (artwork \u00a9 Emma Amos; photograph provided by the Minneapolis Institute of Art, published by permission of the Artists Rights Society)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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In 1994, at the age of fifty-seven, Emma Amos (1937\u20132020) painted a full-length portrait of herself as Wonder Woman balanced precariously above a crowd. Her star-spangled leotard beneath a voluminous painter\u2019s smock clearly points to the heroine of the late 1970s television series. In Amos\u2019s Tightrope<\/em>, the celebrated African American artist holds two paintbrushes in her right hand, and in her left, a hangered T-shirt that depicts a nude torso borrowed from Paul Gauguin\u2019s Two Tahitian Women<\/em> (1899).1<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Earlier in her career, Amos had participated\u2014as the youngest and only woman member\u2014in the African American artist collective Spiral (1963\u201365) and subsequently had played a role as a founding member of the activist feminist art group, the Guerrilla Girls (1985\u2013). Thus, by the time she painted\u00a0Tightrope<\/em>, Amos had more than demonstrated her concern with expanding the art world towards greater inclusion of historically marginalized practitioners, especially those representing Black and female perspectives. In keeping with this mission, and at the height of her artistic career, Amos was now appropriating Gauguin\u2019s figure in\u00a0Tightrope<\/em>\u00a0to critique the late nineteenth-century French artist\u2019s primitivizing of women of color\u2014no less his continued influence on the global contemporary art world.2<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Paul Gauguin, Two Tahitian Women<\/em>, 1899, oil on canvas, 37 x 28\u00bd in. (94 x 72.4\u2009cm), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of William Church Osborn, 1949, 49.58.1 (photograph provided by the Metropolitan Museum of Art; artwork in the public domain)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Gauguin\u2019s painting depicts two young, topless South Pacific women standing beside each other, one holding a tray seemingly loaded with fruit (the identification remains uncertain), while the other is clutching a small bunch of flowers. The women are beguiling and beautiful, seemingly innocent in their lack of bodily shame in front of the painter. Yet, they are also seductive in the way they express a cautious curiosity towards the viewer, and in the analogy to be easily made between their offerings and their own exposed breasts and nipples.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gauguin\u2019s South Pacific paintings have been lauded for advancing continental modernism and, more recently, critiqued for their primitivized depictions of race, gender, and sexuality. Paul Gauguin (1848\u20131903) was famous for purportedly depicting the Indigenous populations of Tahiti and the Marquesas. However, Gauguin worked at least as much from colonialist photographs as from live models. Art historian Elizabeth Childs identifies about sixty of Gauguin\u2019s Polynesian artworks as appropriating poses or motifs from his collection of ethnographic photographs, and photographic reproductions of works of art.3<\/a><\/sup> Consequently, sources for the artist\u2019s \u201cTahitian\u201d paintings derive from Indigenous art forms spanning the globe, including ancient Egyptian royal tomb frescos, Indonesian Buddhist temple reliefs, Easter Island tablets, and Maori wooden gateway figures.4<\/a><\/sup> Gauguin\u2019s artworks do not, therefore, simply take motifs from Tahitian and Marquesan culture, but from a colonialist image category of \u201cprimitive indigeneity\u201d more broadly. Even during his lifetime, Gauguin was accused of lifting his formal, as well as narrative, innovations from others, fellow painter Camille Pissarro noting in 1893, \u201cGauguin is always poaching on someone\u2019s ground; nowadays, he is pillaging the savages of Oceania.\u201d5<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I contend that Amos\u2019s appropriation of Gauguin is thus more accurately defined as \u201creappropriation,\u201d an interdisciplinary concept that indicates an affirmative redefinition of a pre-existent example of cultural appropriation. The idea describes when a marginalized group resignifies an expression originally intended to be pejorative into a favorable identification for their community.6<\/a><\/sup> As with the designations \u201cgay\u201d and \u201cqueer,\u201d a reappropriated word may have originally held a neutral or positive connotation before it was reduced into a slur.7<\/a><\/sup> With reappropriation, a marginalized group reidentifies a formerly critical comment a third time as an affirming group identifier, though the declaration holds the legacy of its past negativity. Doubly appropriated words thus carry within them a range of possibilities for in-group and out-group use (including positive and derogatory applications) that are not fixed, but always in flux.8<\/a><\/sup> A newly claimed utterance of historical oppression, such as the offensive terms \u201cbitch\u201d and the \u201cn-word\u201d may assert agency when used by, respectively, women and African Americans. Yet the expression\u2019s hateful and dehumanizing history remains even after reclamation.9<\/a><\/sup> Reappropriations thus evoke a quality of ambivalence, as they affirm a marginalized group\u2019s identity while acknowledging (rather than denying or erasing) the pain the group has faced in its historic misrepresentation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The term \u201creappropriation\u201d is often applied in sociolinguistics and social psychology, but I propose that it is also useful for analyzing works of art. Visual cultures traffic in an abundance of historical stereotypes, many of which depict marginalized or disempowered groups in demeaning ways. Artists can intervene and critically rework such stereotypes to gain agency in representation, all the while acknowledging past hurt. Artworks employing visual reappropriation demonstrate the potential for restorative self-definition not only linguistically through a renaming, but also visually through re-presentation<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the time of its creation, Gauguin\u2019s art made little room for women of color as active agents in their own representations. The artist documented little about his subjects, and the resultant gaps in the archives have presented challenges for historians seeking to unearth the voices and perspectives of his colonial subjects. Feminist art historians, in particular, have lamented the limited accounts of the lives and opinions of the women Gauguin represented, including his young Tahitian wife, Teha\u2019amana.10<\/a><\/sup> Gender studies scholars and art historians have also noted the androgyny of Gauguin\u2019s Tahitian figures.11<\/a><\/sup> A Maori scholar has even speculated that some of these figures might be m\u0101h\u016b,<\/em> an Indigenous designation used in Tahiti, Hawai\u2019i, and the Marquesas Islands for gender-divergent persons who embody both masculine and feminine qualities.12<\/a><\/sup> Still, there is limited archival information for identifying what may be non-binary subjects in Gauguin\u2019s art.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An accurate and inclusive art historical process involves grappling with absences in the canon and the archive, especially for figures historically marginalized and disempowered due to gender, sexuality, and race. Critical historiography emerging from Black feminism asserts that a lack of historical records does not indicate historical insignificance. Rather, it denotes the need for alternative methods for giving voice to historically ignored or silenced experiences. These methods include imaginative acts of historical recreation (or \u201ccritical fabulation,\u201d in Saidiya Hartman\u2019s words) and attention to embodied knowledge.13<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Amos\u2019s reappropriation in Tightrope<\/em> indicates how women artists of color can reclaim Gauguin\u2019s art to gain symbolic agency in experiences of art world marginalization still impacted by legacies of colonialism. She poses herself as carefully navigating a contemporary art world in which she must grapple with intersectional discrimination.14<\/a><\/sup> Her options are limited to donning Gauguin\u2019s shirt and performing colonialist expectations of alluring primitive feminine sexuality. Or, she may wear the Wonder Woman costume and align herself with white feminists while setting aside her racial identity. A final option is to subsume both her gender and racial identities under the smock of a professional artist, a role so often presumed to be white and male.15<\/a><\/sup> Amos uses Gauguin to visualize her experience of being subjected to a racially and sexually objectifying gaze, one historically rooted in colonialism but still active today. Amos appropriates Gauguin\u2019s paintings as a female African American artist impacted by the history of European primitivized representations of women of color. However, because she is not Tahitian or Marquesan herself, her painting also references Tahiti through<\/em> Gauguin. Her reappropriation thus carries the ambivalence of both inheriting Gauguin\u2019s colonialist views of Tahiti while also working to resist their primitivist ideology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Artists with Indigenous heritage in the South Pacific (but not specifically to the Tahitian or Marquesan islands) have added to the critiques of Gauguin\u2019s visions by employing reappropriation.16<\/a><\/sup> Much of this work, like Amos\u2019s painting, uses Gauguin\u2019s art to address continuing colonialist intersections of sexism and racism. For example, artist Tyla Vaeau, who is of Samoan and European heritage, superimposes snapshot photographs of her sister and a friend into his iconic paintings in place of his female subjects\u2019 faces. The women in Vaeau\u2019s pieces make strained, pouty, and annoyed faces, satirically calling into question Gauguin\u2019s presentations of placid, compliant Indigenous feminine sexuality. Vaeau\u2019s intervention is part of a broader growth in twenty-first century Indigenous Pacific art, much of which blends historical references with critical new media practices, including photography and digital media, to look \u201cback in order to move forward.\u201d17<\/a><\/sup> Additionally, feminist artists from around the world have also reappropriated Gauguin to claim agency in modernist presentations of female sexuality.18<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Contemporary photographers over the last decade have added a new outlook to the mix of critical approaches to Gauguin\u2019s legacy: the issue of nonbinary gender identity. Their projects claim Gauguin\u2019s work to stage intersections between not only gender and race, but also LGBTQIA+ identity.19<\/a><\/sup> My essay will examine the projects of Namsa Leuba (b. 1982) and Yuki Kihara (b. 1975) to consider what these newer photographic works add to pre-existing feminist critiques of Gauguin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Leuba and Kihara are two contemporary photographers who each claim Gauguin as a building block for their own photographs of non-binary and trans women of color living in a postcolonial, tropical context. Leuba is a Swiss-Guinean fine art and fashion photographer based in Bordeaux, France. Japanese-Samoan fine artist Kihara, based in Samoa, represented New Zealand at the 59th Venice Biennial (2022). Each photographer has created a series of works that depict members of Tahiti\u2019s and Samoa\u2019s gender-divergent communities (the latter of which Kihara is a member) in lush, colorful scenes that reimagine Gauguin\u2019s paintings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For example, both Leuba and Kihara reappropriated Gauguin\u2019s Two Tahitian Women<\/em> in 2019 and 2020 in photographs they made (independent of each other) by working with Tahitian and Samoan models. These images echo Gauguin\u2019s originals in their focus on Polynesian women\u2019s and gender-divergent people\u2019s sexuality. \u201cGender divergent\u201d is a generalist phrase that can distinguish Indigenous sexualities from Western designations of \u201ctransgender,\u201d \u201ctranssexual,\u201d and \u201chomosexual.\u201d20<\/a><\/sup> I use \u201cgender divergent\u201d in this essay to indicate the similarity in Tahitian and Samoan beliefs that gender embodiments can express both femininity and masculinity. However, I will also address each culture\u2019s distinct terminologies for gender-divergent populations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I consider Leuba\u2019s and Kihara\u2019s photographic reworkings of Gauguin as examples of reappropriation, even though Leuba and Kihara are not direct descendants of Indigenous Tahitians or Marquesans. This aspect of their identities could raise concerns that their photographs risk recreating exploitative appropriation rather than reappropriation. Such apprehensions are warranted considering the history of colonialism\u2019s objectifying gaze and the absence of Tahitian and Marquesan outlooks in most exhibitions of Gauguin\u2019s art.21<\/a><\/sup> As with Amos\u2019s painting, their photographs ambivalently recall Gauguin\u2019s colonialist legacy, while also critiquing it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gauguin\u2019s paintings were not merely representations of Tahitians or Marquesans but poached a range of imagery from colonialist photographs. As women of color, Leuba and Kihara are negatively impacted by the broad colonialist ideas about the primitivity of people of color that undergird Gauguin\u2019s art. Thus, Leuba and Kihara are postcolonial artists reappropriating Gauguin\u2019s colonialist imagery. Their reparative work involves inviting their subjects to collaborate in the artmaking process, such subjects thus gaining a measure of agency and empowerment. Leuba has discussed the importance of developing relationships with her subjects before photographing them and presenting them as \u201cthey would want viewers to see them.\u201d22<\/a><\/sup> Kihara also explains that she made her photographic series Paradise Camp<\/em> (2020\u2013) for members of Samoa\u2019s gender divergent community, who are referred to by the regional Indigenous term fa\u2019afafine<\/em> (women identified as male at birth).23<\/a><\/sup> As Kihara recently stated of the series, \u201cI want to use [Paradise Camp<\/em>] to build fa\u2019afafine capital.”24<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Leuba and Kihara wield photography to critique the ideological constructions behind Gauguin\u2019s modernist primitivist painting. Unlike Amos, whose career developed during a period when success still meant breaking into the ranks of canonical modernist painters\u2014in other words, primarily white male practitioners\u2014Leuba and Kihara came of age when postmodern strategies of conceptualism and appropriation were challenging modernist ideals. Photography and video (rather than painting) were primary media of choice for much of this work.25<\/a><\/sup> These two artists\u2019 use of the photographic medium indicates their postmodern critique of the modernist ideals of Gauguin\u2019s painting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In keeping with this strategy, Leuba\u2019s and Kihara\u2019s photographs balance awareness of the continued legacies of European primitivist fantasies born in colonial and sexual encounters, with a celebration of the strategies used by marginalized groups to assert control over the construction and presentation of their own identities\u2014the latter most often manifested in acts of theatricality, camp, and drag. I assert that Leuba\u2019s and Kihara\u2019s reworkings of Gauguin build coalitions across distinct populations with shared experiences of marginalization and sexualization under Eurocentrism. Their photographs thus demonstrate the value of an intersectional transfeminist<\/em> outlook for the creation of a revisionist art history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Docu-fictions<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

As an Afro-European woman of color, Namsa Leuba is keenly aware of European racial and cultural perceptions. Leuba grew up in Switzerland, her father\u2019s country of origin, but she often visited Guinea, her mother\u2019s home country, where the artist continues to have extended family. Much of Leuba\u2019s photography addresses issues of identity and mythology in European and African encounters in a postcolonial world. For her photographic series Illusions<\/em> (2017\u201323), Leuba considers a postcolonial legacy from another context: the iconic paintings of Tahitian and Marquesan women by Gauguin. As a young art student, Leuba remembers her father giving her a book of Gauguin\u2019s paintings, which inspired her aesthetic development.26<\/a><\/sup> She returned to Gauguin\u2019s works in 2017 after moving temporarily to Tahiti (she would stay for two years) to photograph the islands\u2019 gender-divergent population.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like many contemporary European travelers to Tahiti, Leuba arrived on the islands well-versed in Gauguin\u2019s imagery and its complicated reception. Gauguin stands as a foundational figure for modernist painting even while his reputation carries suspicions of cultural appropriation and sexual exploitation.27<\/a><\/sup> His art sits in major art collections and is the subject of regular traveling exhibitions and scholarship.28<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0He is included in art historical surveys of Western and global art, such as the core 250 \u201crequired images\u201d of the Advanced Placement (AP) art history curriculum\u2014and accompanying exam\u2014for US high school students.29<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0Some of Gauguin\u2019s most influential art was made in Tahiti after he quit Europe for the South Pacific in 1891. Gauguin sought to escape modern civilization for a so-called primitive existence in nature, an expectation he had formed from consuming European literature and photography addressing Polynesian life and love.30<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0Later coming to feel that Europe had overly influenced Tahiti, Gauguin removed himself to the Marquesas Islands in 1901, where, settling on the island of Hiva-Oa, he sought new models and a \u201cmore savage subject\u201d matter.31<\/a><\/sup> Once resituated, Gauguin continued to paint until his death in 1903. Although Gauguin ostensibly sought change in his surroundings, the Marquesas Islands paintings are similar to the artist\u2019s Tahitian works in both their subject matter and style of rendition.32<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0Gauguin\u2019s depictions of Tahiti and the Marquesas\u2014including paintings of the young women with whom he had sexual relations\u2014would, in turn, shape ideas back in Europe about French Polynesia in general and invigorate avant-garde interest in the creative traditions and sexuality of colonized peoples.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Starting in Gauguin\u2019s own lifetime, observers of what the artist shipped back to Paris expressed concerns that his South Pacific scenes presented problematic approaches to race and sex, while appropriating formal innovations of the cultures he infiltrated. By the late twentieth century, feminist art historians expanded such critiques. Abigail Solomon-Godeau demonstrated that Gauguin\u2019s productions evinced \u201cplagiarisms\u201d of European texts and photographs he had encountered before embarking on his travels, further accusing Gauguin of failing to demonstrate anything authentic about his encounters with his female subjects.33<\/a><\/sup> Griselda Pollock analyzed Gauguin\u2019s formal choices as coding fetishized and comprising touristic fantasies of \u201csexual and racial difference\u201d calculated to increase his art\u2019s value within a capitalist European art system. Additionally, Pollock did not shy from castigating the middle-aged, syphilitic artist for his intimate relationships with young Indigenous women of the South Pacific, all while supporting a wife and family in France.34<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

One might have expected such arguments to have ultimately \u201ccanceled\u201d the artist, as a New York Times<\/em> report of a Gauguin exhibition at The National Gallery, London, in 2019, suggested.35<\/a><\/sup> Gauguin\u2019s art, however, continues to speak to audiences. One element of its enduring legacy may be its depiction of subjects otherwise absent from, or on the margins of, European modernism.36<\/a><\/sup> These include representations of women of color and androgynous expressions of gender. As scholars have noted, Gauguin depicts Tahitian and Marquesan women with broad waists and shoulders, and large hands and feet that contrast with the European late nineteenth-century ideal of the wispy lady.37<\/a><\/sup> Rather than \u201ccancel\u201d this artist, then, Leuba, Kihara, and others have reappropriated Gauguin\u2019s iconic appropriations to expand and build upon the limited modernist traditions of representations of non-European and gender-divergent peoples.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Leuba initiated her project on the heels of a growth of trans visibility and controversy in popular culture. Early twenty-first century media introduced several trans characters and trans-themed television programs. Trans celebrities also gained prominence in popular media, and LGBTQIA+ visibility expanded across the internet.38<\/a><\/sup> Political backlash to these developments has also arisen. For example, many American state legislatures have passed bills in recent years that limit protections for trans people in public accommodations such as access to community bathrooms and healthcare.39<\/a><\/sup> Additionally, recent American executive orders have defined gender as binary and immutable and directed federal agencies to roll back protections for trans people, as well as deny funding to entities that support gender-affirming care.40<\/a><\/sup> Leuba\u2019s project also developed just after Polynesian LGBTQIA+ communities began to formally organize\u2014starting in the early 2000s\u2014to achieve greater recognition and civil rights.41<\/a><\/sup> Such developments, both regionally and globally, resulted in local Indigenous gender-divergent communities gaining activist outlooks and a new vocabulary inspired by their affiliation with global LGBTQIA+ groups. For example, the advocacy efforts of the Samoan Fa\u2019afafine Association recently shifted to also advocate for fa\u2019afatama<\/em> (men biologically identified as female at birth), who are even more marginalized in Samoa than the fa\u2019afafine.42<\/a><\/sup> These organizations represent distinct historical Indigenous identities from different islands, which is captured by the new umbrella initialism MVPFAFF+ (m\u0101h\u016b, vakasalewalewa, palopa, fa\u2019afafine, akava\u2019ine, fakaleiti\/leiti,<\/em> and fakafifine+<\/em>).43<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Academic scholarship over the last few decades has also emphasized the importance of queerness and non-binary gender identity to understanding Gauguin and the history of Euro-Polynesian encounters. Art historian Stephen Eisenman presented a lengthy Gauguin study in 1997 arguing that the artist pursued gender and racial ambiguity in both his personal identity and art as part of a broader desire for liberation from European bourgeois norms.44<\/a><\/sup> Lee Wallace interprets Gauguin\u2019s paintings of androgynous Polynesian women as foils for the artist\u2019s ambivalent \u201cmale-male sexual interest,\u201d reading Gauguin\u2019s primitivism as indicating a desire for queerness. In support of this theory, Wallace connects colonialist travel narratives by Gauguin and others that describe Polynesia\u2019s history of acknowledging more than two genders as essential to the development of modern European and American ideas about male homosexuality. In addition, he argues that much recent European scholarship (including feminist accounts by Solomon-Godeau and Pollock) disavows the importance of queer desire in Euro-Polynesian interactions, as well as the reciprocal influence both cultures had on each other\u2019s ideas about sexuality.45<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Once she situated herself in Tahiti, Leuba began her project by meeting with writer Francois Bauer, author of Raerae de Tahiti<\/em> (Rae-rae of Tahiti), published in 2002.46<\/a><\/sup> A term referring to regional Indigenous trans persons, rae-rae<\/em> was introduced to the Tahitian language in the 1960s when male-to-female gender transitions first became medically possible through hormone therapy and surgery.47<\/a><\/sup> This newer designation is distinct from the older m\u0101h\u016b, which predates European contact. The Indigenous populations of Tahiti, the Marquesas Islands, and Hawaii use m\u0101h\u016b to refer to gender-variant individuals who embody both male and female qualities.48<\/a><\/sup> In Tahiti, the word has historically pertained to effeminate men.49<\/a><\/sup> Tahiti holds strong civil rights protections for MVPFAFF+ peoples, including legally recognized same-sex marriage, and acknowledgment of their social status as a class protected from discrimination. Bauer introduced Leuba to rae-rae and m\u0101h\u016b Tahitians whom the artist interviewed and invited to model for her photographs. Through her discussions, Leuba learned that some of her participants had faced homelessness and family estrangement, while others were readily accepted by their communities. Some models had even been photographed earlier by social documentarists, but those works had emphasized the sitters\u2019 marginalization, disempowerment, and victimization.50<\/a><\/sup> Social documentary photography aims at exposing truths, but its images often present a limited and even biased perspective that is taken as fact.51<\/a><\/sup> Leuba was interested in staging a different, more open-ended kind of encounter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Leuba identifies her photographic process as \u201cdocu-fiction.\u201d The descriptor acknowledges the photographic medium\u2019s indeterminate status as both a documenter of reality and a constructor of deceptions. As she describes it, her works do not present themselves as capturing the<\/em> truth of Tahiti and its gender-divergent community, but a<\/em> truth about her subject.52<\/a><\/sup> Leuba titled her series of Tahiti photographs Illusions.<\/em> Here, she acknowledges her photographs\u2019 own status and points to the history of Western myths of the Pacific, including Gauguin\u2019s own paintings, which were a mix of real and imagined experiences. In France, Gauguin marketed his art as capturing an authentic connection with primitive Tahitians. Still, while painting in Tahiti, he turned for visual inspiration to a range of colonialist travel photographs that circulated in Western popular culture and World\u2019s Fair exhibitions.53<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Namsa Leuba, L\u2019Offrande<\/em> (The Offering), 2019, fiber pigment print, 31\u00bd x 23\u00bd in. (80 x 60\u2009cm). Collection of the artist (artwork \u00a9 Namsa Leuba; photograph provided by the artist)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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An apt example of this is provided by Gauguin\u2019s Two Tahitian Women<\/em>, which Amos quoted, and which Leuba and Kihara both recreated. Elizabeth Childs has revealed that the artist borrowed some of his iconography in this instance from a photograph of temple reliefs in Borobudur, Java, which depict a topless woman offering up a tray of flowers to a voyager visiting the temple from afar.54<\/a><\/sup> Gauguin\u2019s painting is thus as much a painterly dreamscape inspired by a Javanese photograph as it is derived from any firsthand encounter in Tahiti. The artist had traveled nearly ten thousand miles to escape \u201ccivilization,\u201d though he continued to rely upon elements of its visual culture to construct his artworks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In partial self-conscious response to Gauguin\u2019s tableau, Leuba\u2019s L\u2019Offrande<\/em> (The Offering), of 2019, reworks Two Tahitian Women<\/em> into a meditation on truth and illusion. As a photograph, it depicts real individuals whom the photographer encountered: two rae-rae who wear colorfully striped sarongs. One figure holds a wooden bowl carved with traditional Polynesian motifs, which bears tropical offerings from land and sea: orchids and anthuriums, coral and shells. The image was shot in sharp focus, and its defined edges and strong value contrasts wrench Gauguin\u2019s scene out of its original, flattened, dreamlike setting. Yet, Leuba self-consciously stages her subjects in a fantasy context of tropical overabundance. Her subjects wear sarongs with intensely saturated stripes of color. The clothes hang loosely as if the models are ready to undress, possibly for a swim, at any moment. Their bare chests are covered only by long, shiny black hair or palm fronds, recalling familiar historical touristic imagery of hula skirts and tiki girls. Unexpectedly, both figures are decorated with hot pink body paint. The intense color echoes the saturated shades of fabric and the hues of the tropical flowers carried ceremoniously by one of the figures. The radically unnatural skin tone prevents the photograph from being read as an authentic documentary or touristic image of tropical women in situ; instead, the painting signals its own status as a constructed fantasy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Leuba does not expose her subjects\u2019 natural skin colors in any of the Illusions<\/em> series photographs. Instead, she realigns their complexions with natural hues associated with the islands\u2019 waters, plants, and skies. The overall series exhibits a rainbow of skin tones. The intense palette draws attention to the fact that race is an important factor in fantasies of what most defines tropical identity. The luminescent colors all but cancel Gauguin\u2019s original association of exoticism (and attendant eroticism) with the brown skin of his subjects. Leuba asks her audience to think more critically about the historical role of race in primitivist imagery like Gauguin\u2019s, while at the same time celebrating colorful skin. Leuba\u2019s resplendent tones suggest that identities presumed to be innate\u2014like race and gender\u2014are socially constructed and performative.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Leuba also shifts her subjects\u2019 gazes upwards in ways that indicate a newfound personal agency not apparent in Gauguin\u2019s picture. Indeed, the figures in Gauguin\u2019s Two Tahitian Women<\/em> seem submissive to an outside viewer\u2019s sexualizing stare. Notably, neither figure is looking directly at the viewer; the woman on the right has even partially turned her head, as if out of innocence and shyness. By marked contrast, the women in L\u2019Offrande<\/em> hold their heads higher than Gauguin\u2019s, their chins noticeably lifted rather than tucked downward. Unlike the original subjects\u2019 placid compliance, these women\u2019s heavily shadowed eyes communicate a steely strength. The figure on the right covers half her face with a branch of Dancing Lady orchids. Her other eye, more heavily in shadow, pierces the viewer, its visibility made even more prominent by her light blue contact lenses. These women\u2019s gazes also communicate\u2014despite their hint of agency\u2014guarded restraint and intense observation. They hold critical awareness of the power relations between subject and viewer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Paul Gauguin, Vahine no te vi<\/em> (Woman of the Mango), 1892, oil on canvas, 28\u00be x 17\u00be in. (73 x 45.1\u2009cm), Baltimore Museum of Art: The Cone Collection, formed by Dr. Claribel Cone and Miss Etta Cone of Baltimore, Maryland, BMA 1950.213 (photograph provided by the Baltimore Museum of Art; artwork in the public domain)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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With her emphasis on dazzling colors and gestures of hide-and-seek, Leuba\u2019s photograph evokes the aesthetics of drag. In contemporary Tahiti, drag shows and pageants are regularly performed.55<\/a><\/sup> While the defining parameters and meanings of drag have shifted in culturally and historically distinct times and places, drag is generally understood to involve an exaggerated performance of binary gender codes applying to male and female gender identity\u2014fashion, hair, makeup, physical postures and gestures, voice intonation, and so forth\u2014that may also engage comedy, song, and dance.56<\/a><\/sup> Following Judith Butler\u2019s use of drag to establish her theory of gender performativity in her 1990 publication, Gender Trouble<\/em>, drag became key to many academic studies that called gender essentialism into question.57<\/a><\/sup> In these studies, drag has been read as radical and liberating. But drag has also been popularized in recent decades in mass media forms and entertainment venues, such as the popular US reality television competition RuPaul\u2019s Drag Race<\/em>. Thus, drag has somewhat paradoxically also been regarded as conformist in nature\u2014especially when performers of color compete in such pageants to adopt ideals of white femininity propagated by colonialism.58<\/a><\/sup> As with reappropriation, drag involves a marginalized group resignifying cultural symbols (here, of Western notions of essentialized binary gender identity) that can also function to exclude or disempower the group. Drag (like reappropriation) therefore carries a range of creative and interpretive possibilities (including positive and derogatory applications) within it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Namsa Leuba, La Femme \u00e0 la Papaya IV<\/em> (Woman with a papaya IV), 2019, fiber pigment print, 31\u00bd x 23\u00bd in. (80 x 60\u2009cm). Collection of the artist (artwork \u00a9 Namsa Leuba; photograph provided by the artist)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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The artificial skin tones in L\u2019Offrande<\/em> accommodate the diverse historical perspectives of drag. Leuba\u2019s approach both recreates aspects of Gauguin\u2019s gendered exoticism and colonial fantasy, while also working to denaturalize his essentialist visualization of race. To consider another example, Leuba has also reappropriated Gauguin\u2019s Vahine no te vi (Woman of the Mango)<\/em>, of 1892. In Gauguin\u2019s painting, a young woman wears a deep purple Western dress. She looks off to the side, seemingly unconcerned with the viewer and unaware of the sexualized symbolism of the mango in her hand. And in Leuba\u2019s La Femme \u00e0 la Papaya IV<\/em> (Woman with a papaya IV), of 2019, Leuba paints her subject\u2019s muscular chest and strong, manicured hands in the same rich tone as Gauguin\u2019s dress. Here Leuba strips away the Western attire, dressing her rae-rae model in a stereotypically tropical ensemble: coconut shell bra, South Pacific sarong, and floral crown. The model\u2019s sleek purple skin stands out vividly against the sharp, green palm leaves, drawing in the viewer\u2019s eye and activating a haptic sense of touch. Unlike Gauguin\u2019s model, who seems unconcerned with the viewer, Leuba\u2019s figure engages directly with the audience, locking eyes with those who gaze at her while she presents the cut-open papaya\u2014its flesh and seeds exposed for display. Like a drag performer, Leuba\u2019s model seems aware of the theatrical nature of her interaction with the audience. Her exaggeration of seemingly natural gender and racial expressions directs the audience to recognize how such qualities are socially constructed. Leuba has transformed Gauguin\u2019s more coded sexualizing of a fully clothed model into a photograph self-consciously performative of desire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After Gauguin<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Samoan multimedia artist Yuki Kihara reappropriated twelve of Gauguin\u2019s paintings in a series of photographs of Samoa\u2019s fa\u2019afafine community for Paradise Camp<\/em>, her exhibition for the New Zealand national pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennial (2022). Even though Gauguin never depicted Indigenous subjects from New Zealand or Samoa, Kihara\u2019s critical reworkings of the French artist\u2019s South Pacific paintings are relevant to the Indigenous populations of both countries. Gauguin did visit New Zealand once, in August of 1895, where he sketched Maori treasures in Auckland\u2019s art galleries and museums for inspiration.59<\/a><\/sup> Although he never visited Samoa, Gauguin utilized colonial photographs of the country\u2019s people and sites as source material.60<\/a><\/sup> Thus, his paintings reflect influences from New Zealand and Samoan Indigenous societies. Kihara\u2019s Paradise Camp<\/em> accordingly restages Gauguin\u2019s art to address generalist Western colonialist and touristic fantasies of Indigenous Polynesian populations that\u2014as in Gauguin\u2019s own paintings\u2014often do not distinguish between the unique cultures and traditions of distinct islands.61<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kihara herself identifies as fa\u2019afafine, thus adopting the Samoan descriptor for non-binary individuals. The term translates into English as \u201cin the manner of a woman,\u201d expressly designating females who had been biologically identified as male at birth. Fa\u2019afafine is one of the four culturally recognized genders in Samoa, alongside female, male, and fa\u2019afatama, meaning \u201cin the manner of a man,\u201d or denoting men who had been biologically identified as female at birth. Although these four genders are culturally recognized, only male and female genders are acknowledged in Samoan legislation. Samoa therefore offers significantly fewer civil rights and protections for MVPFAFF+ individuals than Tahiti. The country does not legally recognize same-sex marriage, and sodomy remains a crime, even though the law prohibiting it is not regularly enforced.62<\/a><\/sup> Partly in response to such social and political conditions, Kihara asserts that she is \u201cdriven to create work that empowers an audience,\u201d and that Paradise Camp<\/em> was specifically made for the fa\u2019afafine and fa\u2019afatama communities.63<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A multi-platform contemporary artist, Kihara has created bodies of work in a wide range of media, including photography, film, and mixed media, in attempting to address the history of gender-divergent Polynesian identity and its depiction in colonialist imagery. Her work often recreates examples of modern art, and nineteenth and early twentieth-century photographs of scantily clad women. Her sources exhibit the \u201cdusky maiden,\u201d a colonialist construction of Polynesian women as sexually alluring, but also innocent and guileless.64<\/a><\/sup> As a woman of Indigenous heritage who often employs herself as her subject, her works repurpose such examples of stereotyped portraiture to examine how power informs identity, especially in the wake of colonialism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like Leuba, Kihara is of mixed national and racial parentage, her mother Samoan, her father Japanese; consequently, she grew up in Samoa, Japan, and New Zealand. Kihara therefore shares with Leuba experiences of biracial and multinational identity. This background informs her interest in the cross-cultural, Euro-Polynesian legacies of Gauguin\u2019s Tahitian paintings. As a fa\u2019afafine artist of color, Kihara experiences intersectional identity as both a racial and gender minority in the fine art world. And like Leuba\u2014and Emma Amos, as is evident in Tightrope<\/em>\u2014she finds Gauguin\u2019s works to be fruitful ground for reflecting on this experience. Kihara has the added dimension of being an MVPFAFF+ artist, and her intersectional condition thus encompasses aspects of race, gender, and sexual identity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kihara sees herself as being in conversation with Gauguin across the centuries. She states that she and Gauguin are \u201cartists from two different parts of the world having a dialogue in two different moments in art history.\u201d65<\/a><\/sup> Her emphasis on \u201cmoments in art history\u201d indicates that Kihara is not looking to Gauguin for ahistorical aesthetic influence, but that she is reassessing his legacy from the perspective of today\u2019s socio-political stakes. Her approach is well-versed in Western art history, including conceptual art\u2019s critical focus on the role of language in fine art, and dadaist traditions of appropriation originating in Marcel Duchamp\u2019s readymades, as well as the strategies of 1980s Appropriation Art, when artists like Sherrie Levine and Richard Prince rephotographed iconic imagery as their own. Inspired by postmodern thinking, including Roland Barthes\u2019s \u201cThe Death of the Author,\u201d their works staged questions such as, \u201cWhich of these renditions is more truthful, authentic?\u201d and \u201cWhat is authorial originality in the context of capitalist exchange and its expansive photographic visual culture?\u201d66<\/a><\/sup> Kihara\u2019s reappropriations thus reflect a distinctly ironic, postmodernist approach toward dismantling modernist mythologies informing seemingly neutral language and imagery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kihara challenges Gauguin\u2019s historical authority by appropriating and updating his images. Her works announce themselves as reappropriations of Gauguin by making their repetition obvious in both their imagery and titles. Her Two Fa\u2019afafine (after Gauguin)<\/em>, of 2020, for example, closely resembles Two Tahitian Women<\/em>. Kihara\u2019s models are posed in nearly identical formation to Gauguin\u2019s, and they retain their natural skin color. Their sarongs drape similarly as in the nineteenth-century example, and they hold props like those found in Gauguin\u2019s work. The lush, tropical forest background is also flattened by Kihara like the abstract shadows of the earlier painting, with the many crisscrossing leaves and trunks cancelling any establishment of a larger depth of field.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Yuki Kihara, Two Fa\u2019afafine (after Gauguin)<\/em>, 2020, chromogenic print,373\u221516 x 28 in. (94.5 x 71.1\u2009cm), from the Paradise Camp exhibition curated by Natalie King and commissioned by The Arts Council of New Zealand Toi Aotearoa for the Aotearoa New Zealand Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale, 2022 (artwork \u00a9 Yuki Kihara; photograph provided by Yuki Kihara and Milford Galleries, Dunedin, New Zealand)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Whereas Leuba\u2019s reappropriation of Two Tahitian Women<\/em> in Two Fa\u2019afafine<\/em> self-consciously emphasizes artifice to denaturalize Gauguin\u2019s fantasies, Kihara leans into a dry and cerebral sense of irony. Her titles express a deadpan quotation that calls the value of traditional concepts of originality into question. She continues throughout the Paradise Camp<\/em> series in this manner, modeling each piece on a specific Gauguin work. She titles each work with an English translation of the original French (or something quite close to it), adding to the end of each title, in parentheses, \u201cafter Gauguin.\u201d Several of her recreations replace Gauguin\u2019s use of a French feminine noun in the original title\u2014such as \u201cTahitienne\u201d or \u201cfemme,\u201d or the English translation \u201cwoman,\u201d by which the work has come to be known today\u2014with the Indigenous gender variant descriptor \u201cfa\u2019afafine.”67<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kihara\u2019s use of the originality disclaimer, \u201cafter Gauguin,\u201d makes obvious to the viewer that Gauguin inspired the works, given that \u201cafter\u201d suggests a subsequent execution \u201cin the manner of\u201d a chosen, \u201cmaster\u201d model. Notably this phrasing evokes the common translation for fa\u2019afafine: \u201cin the manner of a woman.\u201d Kihara\u2019s titling thus relates her adoption of Gauguin\u2019s identity to the adoption of feminine gender characteristics. Both forms of identity\u2014artistic\/authorial and gendered\u2014are thereby proposed as a series of signs that one can perform. The art world knows Gauguin through his most iconic pieces; other artists can copy his look to indicate \u201cGauguin-ness.\u201d Kihara\u2019s titling ultimately suggests that both Gauguin\u2019s iconic style and what is culturally accepted as \u201cfeminine\u201d can be replicated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kihara\u2019s work evokes a campy sensibility. Historian George Chauncey defines camp as originating in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Western culture, a time during which gay men felt the necessity to lead double lives.68<\/a><\/sup> Their use of double entendres, irony, and humor enabled a play both with<\/em> and against<\/em> dominant social codes. Gay men enacted subcultural signs of women\u2019s culture to make space for the gay community within pre-existent heteronormative society. Drag balls were an extreme version of this, which parodied the practice of debutante balls for young women \u201ccoming out\u201d into society.69<\/a><\/sup> Definitions of drag and camp vary and overlap, but generally, drag is considered to be an exaggerated performance of gender codes, whereas camp is more broadly defined as an aesthetics of artificiality that can be used to both hide and reveal identity, and is often aligned with queer culture.70<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kihara references campiness directly in her exhibition\u2019s very title: Paradise Camp<\/em>. On the one hand, the \u201ccamp\u201d of her title recalls the temporary habitations (such as tents or other encampments) of travelers who come to Samoa and other South Pacific islands on vacation, expressly looking for the exoticism depicted in Gauguin\u2019s paintings. Yet, the term \u201ccamp\u201d also references queer aesthetics.71<\/a><\/sup> Thus, Kihara\u2019s use of \u201ccamp\u201d in the title is itself \u201cboth, and\u201d\u2014in other words, it can code within<\/em> heteronormative culture while also speaking against<\/em> it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two Fa\u2019afafine (after Gauguin)<\/em> has this campy \u201cboth, and\u201d quality. The image closely mimics the language of Gauguin\u2019s original, while it also represents fa\u2019afafine bodies. The artist exposes the flat chests of her fa\u2019afafine models, proposing a non-binary challenge to Gauguin\u2019s original. This tactic contrasts with that employed by Leuba in L\u2019Offrande<\/em>, which teases the viewer by covering her models\u2019 chests with hair and palm fronds. The two artists\u2019 reappropriation strategies overlap, but Kihara\u2019s is more dryly campy, whereas Leuba\u2019s goes full drag.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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