May 02 2017

Highlights from the Inaugural Honolulu Biennial

by Nathalie Johnston

Exterior view of The Hub, the main venue of the Honolulu Biennial. All photos by Nathalie Johnston for ArtAsiaPacific.

The first edition of the Honolulu Biennial has already been in full swing for one month by the time I arrived in Hawai’i. Directed by Fumio Nanjo of Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum, and curated by Ngahiraka Mason, formerly of Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, the Biennial, entitled “Middle of Now | Here,” is the first-ever event of its kind in the Pacific Islands.

According to the curatorial premise as stated by Nanjo and Mason, the Biennial “showcases the diversity of ideas, art, and culture from the people who live today throughout the places connected by the Pacific Ocean.” In particular, the 33 participating artists and artist duos come from the Pacific Islands, Asia, Australia, New Zealand and North America. The result is a refreshing display of works situated throughout Honolulu, including the neighborhoods Waikiki and Chinatown, as well as in major museums and public spaces. It is within these different pockets within the city that the artists reflected on indigenous and local cultures, climate change, spiritual connections to land and water, and the colonization of island life throughout history to present day.

At the main event venue, The Hub, located within the recently built master-planned community Ward Village, 21 artists exhibited throughout what appeared to be a former Sports Authority store. Unpainted wood panels walled off rooms creating independent environments in which to experience the work. Familiar names included Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan from the Philippines, who overstuff wooden boats with family belongings, debris, lamps, surfboards and all manner of other found objects from the Pacific, until the structures nearly topple over. Filling the room, the fleet of boats speaks to the Aquilizans’ connection to Filipino immigrants who came to Hawai’i to work on the cane fields on Maui.

The other husband-and-wife duo, Ken and Julia Yonetani, displayed four glowing green and purple chandeliers, which hung in a dark, secluded room. Its radiance is meant to remind visitors of countries—in this case, USA, Japan, China and Taiwan—who generate nuclear power. Conceptualized in the wake of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in Japan in 2011, the size of the chandeliers corresponds with the number of nuclear plants in each country, connecting the dreams of human ambition and results of human limitation.

MARIQUITA “MICKI” DAVIS, Magellan Doesn’t Live Here, 2012–17, still from video: 21 min 23 sec. Davis’ video approaches multiple questions about Guam—who are its people and where do they live? What is their relationship with the colonial past? And what is their voice? Magellan and his crew were the first Europeans to have contact with Guam and the Chamorros, Guam’s native people. It was recorded that the Europeans were especially impressed the outrigger canoes, which the Chamorros used to travel and defend the islands.

CHRIS RITSON, Ganoderma (Biogenerative Painting), 2017, ganoderma fungi, saw-dust, and varnish, dimensions variable. These are living paintings. Ganoderma is a fungus that grows on trash. For this project, Ritson scraped off fungus from ocean debris found in the Ala Wai canal on O’ahu. Ocean trash is the only thing one can legally remove from the beaches in Hawai’i. Reflecting on this idea of a living organism in contact with the waste and refuse of human capital, it seems Ritson connotes two opposing viewpoints: One is that nature can in some ways reclaim objects, while the other is that Hawai’i has an ongoing trash problem, where ocean currents bring debris from all over the Pacific to its shores.

BEATRICE GLOW’s mixed-media installation Rhunhattan Tearoom (2015) comprises of ceramic pots, from a Delftware tea set, and silk-painted scarves with imagery representing colonial expansion during the spice trade period (1603–1800). The horrors that resulted from the trade included enslavement, ritual beatings, sickness and death. Glow’s work includes the heady aroma of nutmeg and cloves, a scent that must have infused island life as well as provided a sweet-smelling backdrop to this unsavory trade.

TEAMLAB, Grafitti Nature, 2016– , interactive digital installation, dimensions variable. This is an interactive and educational media art project, where participants—children and adults alike—can draw living creatures, scan the images, and their pictures then appear and move on the floor of the exhibition space. These images—from whales to butterflies to monsters—join in the “food chain” and electric jungle of the room, interacting with other drawings and dancing about the floors, walls and ceiling in bursts of color and light. On an island, one cannot help but feel close to nature. The digital jungle created by TeamLab offers a glimpse into the future of digital art, one which can include all things.

Billboard advertisements are prohibited in Hawai’i. The reason for this is to protect local commercial enterprises from big company advertising and, of course, the dignity of the coastline and interior landscapes of the islands of Hawai’i. DREW KAHU’ĀINA BRODERICK prints on vinyl a section of the painting by George Carter (1737–1794), depicting the death of Captain Cook in Hawai’i. Cook was killed while attempting to kidnap the King of Hawai’i, Kalaniʻōpuʻu. Broderick’s billboard is a grim advertisement of the development of the Hawaiian Islands based on foreign interests—commercial, religious and colonial.

EKO NUGROHO spent two weeks as artist-in-residence at the Shangri-La Center for Islamic Arts and Cultures, a well-known museum of Islamic art, part of the collection and former home of Doris Duke (1912–1993), a wealthy socialite and collector of the 20th century. Nugroho’s work consisted of multiple paintings on textile as well as murals displayed in multiple locations, looking at the shared problems in global politics and how these problems affect the vast majority of humanity, even if they are made in the interests of one particular country. Nugroho celebrates democracy and calls for empathy in a political atmosphere of populism.

GREG SEMU, After Hans Holbein the Younger –The Body of the Dead Christ_, 2016, diptych: 40 × 180 cm each. Hans Holbein was known as a great portrait artist of the 16th century. His large painting of the body of Christ after his death was an attempt to give humanity to Jesus, to show what he suffered during his life and death. In Semu’s work, he uses his own body to position himself as Christ in the same position, with the same wounds, and in the same dimensions as Holbein’s original paintings. The difference is that Semu’s body is covered in traditional Samoan tattoos (_tatau), which Semu calls “a symbolic passport to the afterlife.” The tradition of tatau is at least 3,000 years old and predates Christ. Semu asks the viewer to perceive the tattoos as Bible verses, and be witness to the initiations of men in Samoan communities, just as Christ was initiated through his death.

VERNON AH KEE’s three-channel video installation CantChant (2009) explores “the beach” as contested space, as much of it symbolizes an aspect of central white Australian identity through surfing, clothing lines, advertising and tourism. These spaces, however, are also sites of historic and contemporary cruelty towards indigenous communities. Ah Kee is a member of the Kuku Yalandji, Koko Berrin, Waanji, Yidinji and Gugu Yimithirr peoples. He films fellow indigenous members and surfers clothed in trendy gear and surfing the coastline, demonstrating the disconnect between the advertised white surfer of Australia and the Aboriginal peoples.

The name of this new single-channel video is Wasl, which means “union” in Arabic. SAMA ALSHAIBI focuses on mass migration due to water shortage and rising ocean levels. Alshaibi’s video takes us from desert to plain, from ocean to creek, where she places herself in mitigating positions with nature. Music plays as the portraits on screen move from place to place. The struggle for water is deepening, as is the issue of global migration.

Many artworks in the Biennial also allude to the fact that many islands in the South Pacific have been used as nuclear test sites, including those that make up Hawai’i. Mariquita “Micki” Davis’ short documentary film Magellan Doesn’t Live Here (2012–17) explores displaced Chamorro communities who wish to make a symbolic return to their ancestral homeland of Guam. Davis looks at this history of contact and documents a group of Chamorros now living in California, who planned to construct an outrigger and sail it back to Guam, entering the harbor as returnees to their ancestral home. In the end, they were not able to sail it due to Pacific storms, but instead shipped the piece to Guam and ceremoniously sailed it into the harbor, the same one where Magellan allegedly landed in 1521. The failed attempt to sail as their ancestors did in a Sakman, or outrigger—turns into a beautiful homecoming.

With a total of nine venues presenting the Biennial, it takes some time to see the exhibition in its entirety. Focusing on works just at The Hub for this blog, I appreciate the clarity of the theme and the messages so pointedly contextualized by the curators. Artists are eager and open to “finding solutions to island concerns,” states Mason. With this navigable communication in and around the Pacific Oceans, the islands and their artists are the North Stars.

The Honolulu Biennial is currently on view at various locations around the city of Honolulu until May 8, 2017.

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