Shigeyuki Kihara with her winning work Fa’afine artist Shigeyuki Kihara has won the 2012 Wallace Art Trust Paramount Award with a tsunami memorial piece. The 37-year-old Aucklander's winning digital video work Galu Afi: Waves of Fire includes a traditional Samoan dance, in memory of the victims of the 2009 tsunami in American Samoa, Samoa and Tonga. This is the first time video art has been admitted into the running for the awards, which were established by arts patron Sir James Wallace 21 years ago. Kihara was born in Samoa to a Japanese father and Samoan mother, and has lived in New Zealand since she was 16. After initially studying fashion design, she became artist, but also merged the two forms: In 2001, her T-shirt series Teuanoa‛i - Adorn to Excess which parodied well-known corporate logos were exhibited at Te Papa and later added to the national museum's collection. The T-shirts featured Kihara's take on well-known brands, turning logos such as The Warehouse to The Whorehouse and KFC to KKK. Kihara was the first New Zealander to ever hold a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York with her self-portrait series Shigeyuki Kihara: Living Photographs from October 2008 to February 2009. It included nudes in provocative poses that portrayed colonial images of Polynesian women as sexual objects. She is also a curator, in 2007 pulling together a group exhibition about Samoan Fa'afafine titled Measina Fa'afafine: treasures from a liminal space at Artstation gallery in Auckland. She also co-curated Hand in Hand in Sydney in 2008, which presented various art forms and mediums to challenge dominant ideas about gender and sexuality in an intercultural exhibition of 17 Indigenous artists from the Pacific and Australia. Kihara’s winning work will be on display alongside the finalists’ work at the Pah Homestead from today until 11 November.
Credit: GayNZ.com Daily News staff
First published: Tuesday, 4th September 2012 - 2:00pm