To Te Tuhi Centre

13/03/09

This tutorial class had trip to visit the Te Tuhi Centre. The main purpose was to see an artist- Shigeyuki Kihara’s composition and listened to her lecture. Through these productions, I felt that she work very hard and she wanted to tell us the story about her native. She cares about everything around her and always keeps looking for the history about her home town.

Shigeyuki Kihara is a multimedia and performance artist who uses photography to explore theme of Pacific culture, identity, indigenous spirituality, colonialism, stereotypes, gender roles, and consumerism. Kihara was born in Samoa and she has both Japanese and Samoan decent. Now she lives in Aotearoa/ New Zealand.

At first Shigeyuki Kihara used project and vedio to introduce her background, photos and her creations. Meanwhile, she showed a proficient skill in using these modern technologic media. It was showed a plenty of productions and with her own special style. No matter it attract me very much.

Her inspiration and motivation are came from a variety of course, including 19th and early 20th century colonial photographs which were made by non-indigenous artists who contributed many erroneous perceptions about Pacific Islanders and their culture.

In the triptych, Kihara seems to be both a director and an actor in this performance. She presents a provocative, reclining pose that evokes numerous historical photographs of lounging seductive women( they call “belles”, it means beautiful woman). The series has a powerful commentary by the Western perceptions of Pacific Islanders. Also, the sexual stereotypes were penetrated by early images. Kihara confront and challenges assumptions about gender identity. She illustrate different point and extent the views for male and female.

After the speech, I watched her works in the centre. In my view, she is a versatile artist; she has plenty of creations and imaginations in different ways. I like her performance, especially the t-shirt she designed. Furthermore, the subject that she chose is not difficult for anyone. However, she did very carefully in each part and used a fantastic skill to interpret her ideas. I am impressed about her t-shirt design, every logo in each t-shirt, we can found on advertise, poster, or stuffs we can easily find in our life. But she changed the text to another funny style, for example, “Parking Save” to “Fun’k Save.” It’s a gorgeous design to attract people vision.

Today, Kihara is a great designer and great creativity and full of confidence.

The artist Tal R

Article From: Flash Art
Title: The Lord of Waste
Artist: Tal R
Author: Jan Hendrik Wentrup

It’s early autumn of last year and I’m standing in Tal R’s sitting room. It’s early morning, and bright sunlight is streaming in through the windows of th wooden house. Tal’s three-year- old son Yunus is sitting on a little chair next to me and watching a cartoon on television. A little mole is standing on his molehill in the middle of a green meadow. There are trees and colorful flowers all around him. The sun is yellow circle shining in the sky. A lorry drives up, opens its tailgate and tips a mountain of rubbish onto the meadow: colored balls, and umbrella, car tires, bottle. The little mole jumps up and down on his hill and complains at the top of his voice. Yunus watches the on-screen action, fascinated, then suddenly turns round to me and shouts out: “Papa, papa painting.”

Like his son, many critics feel they’re in a late adolescent’s untidy bedroom when confronted Tal R’s pictures. The two dimensional pictorial structure, the schematic representation of the world of things, the occasionally smeary gesture and the rich colors are sufficient justification for many viewers to feel that they are dealing with a finger-painting imitator. Here they fail to acknowledge both the sophisticated content, derived from a large number of cultural, sexual, and religious sources, and Tal R’s approach to recent art history.

The 2002 picture “Riders in the Sky” is built on a strictly linear pattern. The lower part of the picture consists of an overgrown cemetery landscape with curving pine trees and a colored gravestone without an inscription. Glowing, colorful beams of light rise up out of the middle of his last earthly resting place, spreading out into the upper part of the picture like a fan. A gang of motorcyclists rides headlong along the Highway to Heaven and out into the supernatural. These clichéd figures on the fat-tired bikes appear for the first time in a picture painted two years earlier.

In the story I told at the beginning, the mole is furious at first and then sad for a long time about the rubbish in his meadow. But a moment comes when he starts to pay attention to it. He climbs into the old car tire and rolls down the hill in it; he puts up an old umbrella and floats down from a tree; he cuts the ball in two and uses one half of it as a hat, the other half as a boat. Then he piles it all into a big heap and enjoys all the shapes and colors it contains. Tal R does just the same.

In my opinion, I like Tal’s work because his masterpiece is similar with Pablo Picasso. No matter the style, color used, he gave us the joyful emotions when he used the brightly color such as “Cusines” the painting with many spot shapes and different colors. Also, his composition can attract many people, because his work is more lively, more fascinating when after people look his work and his great achievement.