About the Artist: Yuki Kihara

Abstract

Yuki Kihara is a globally accomplished, award-winning interdisciplinary Pacific artist, researcher, and curator. She is of Samoan and Japanese heritage and identifies as Fa‘afafine, a third gender meaning “in the manner of a woman.” Her pathbreaking works exist at the critical intersections of gender, indigeneity, history, diaspora, decolonization, and the environment. Kihara studied fashion design and technology at Wellington Polytechnic (now Massey University) in Aotearoa New Zealand, where she later worked as a costume designer and stylist in fashion magazines, the performing arts, and the film industry before forging a distinct career as a contemporary artist, bringing her industry experience into her art practice. Kihara’s career took off following her 2000 exhibition Teuanoa‘i: Adorn to Excess. She continued her practice in performance art and lens-based media, developing a series of works including Black Sunday (2002), Faleaitu: House of Spirits (2003), Vavau: Tales of Ancient Sāmoa (2004), and Fa‘a fafine: In the Manner of a Woman (2005), all of which were featured in a survey exhibition entitled Living Photographs presented at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2008. In 2004, Kihara began performing Salomé, a ghostly historical character in black Victorian PHOTO BY LUKE WALKER