Yuki Kihara & Natalie King:
In Conversation
Conversing with curator Natalie King, artist Yuki Kihara discusses her Japanese Sāmoan ancestry, Fa’afafine pageantry and colonial photography while reflecting on her solo acquisitive exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and her selection to represent Aotearoa New Zealand at the 59th Venice Biennale, rescheduled to 2022.
Yuki Kihara is exceptionally creative, habitually outspoken and unassailable in addressing some of the most urgent issues of our times. In September 2019, we were appointed as the artist-curator duo for Aotearoa New Zealand at the 59th Venice Biennale, which has been delayed until 2022. Yuki is the first Sāmoan and Pasifika artist selected to represented Aoteroa New Zealand. Fortunately, I was able to visit Yuki’s studio in Upolu, Sāmoa in March 2020, prior to the COVID-19 lockdown. Since then, we have been working across times zones and waterways: Zooming, reading, exchanging, discussing and conversing. We paused to conduct this interview via email while Yuki was in an apartment in Auckland waiting to be repatriated back to Sāmoa, and I was at home in Melbourne.
You were born in Sāmoa, went to primary school in Ōsaka (and can speak Ōsaka-ben dialect) and St Patrick’s College Silverstream in Wellington before studying fashion at Wellington Polytechnic. Can you discuss your ancestry and how you became an interdisciplinary artist?
The steady arrival of Japanese people to Sāmoa first came about as a result of Japanese foreign diplomacy. Sāmoa was the first country in Oceania to dispatch a JICA volunteer (Japan International Cooperation Agency) from Japan in December 1972, which subsequently generated a new cross-cultural relationship between Sāmoa and Japan.
My Sāmoan mother met my Japanese father, who was one of the first wave of JICA volunteers, in Upolu Island. Shortly after I was born in Sāmoa in 1975, my parents moved to Jakarta, Indonesia due to my dad’s..Subscribe to read this article in full
