A question of identity

By ADAM GIFFORD


In the post-World War II exotica boom, Vladimir Tretchikoff's paintings of mysterious oriental beauties shared lounge space with tiki torches and Bali Hai sunsets.

For her latest show, Fatu i le ele'ele - Seed of the Earth, at the relocated Whitespace gallery in Crummer Rd, Tuakau artist Nanette Lela'ulu has taken the Tretchikoff template, substituted Polynesian princesses, and plonked them in rural Auckland landscapes.

So is it ironic appropriation or serious homage?

"I'm not sure. I use it as a source rather than a base. It's loose," says Lela'ulu.

"I've always been fascinated by Tretchikoff. The paintings are so commercial, they are everywhere and lots of young Pacific Island people have them in their homes.

"I have always been interested in taking things which have been done before and putting a Pacific Island flavour into them. The difference in this lot is I have given them a New Zealand base, which I have not done before."

Ask Lela'ulu if she is a "Pacific Island painter" and she will deny it, but questions of identity permeate her work.

In part it may be the difference between growing up in what seemed like the only brown family in Howick, but having more contact with her father's large Samoan family than her mother's palagi kin.

"You are never Samoan because you are white and you are never white because you are too Samoan, but all of a sudden, when you do something successful, you are Samoan," she says.

Her early work dwelt on the struggle between Samoan and New Zealand cultures.

But a break from painting, and a move from the inner city to Tuakau, has given her a new appreciation of landscape.

The works at Whitespace, their internal spaces established by the flat planes of weatherboard white buildings against raw hills and big skies, echo the explorations of earlier generations of painters such as Robin White and Rita Angus.

In one work she leaves the figure out and tries to record the architectural details of a colonial hall at Awhitu, white light, warm breeze, perhaps the sound of cicadas. In another, she captures the full moon struggling through a roiling black cloud above the hillside behind her house.

Lela'ulu's cool south of Auckland visions contrast strongly with the South Auckland heat of Andy Leleisi'uao, who takes up the rest of the gallery with his series The Ballad of Tinouamea and Pepe.

Strong pinks, lurid plastic tiki green and the bright red of seed pod necklaces give his paintings a reckless energy as he documents the struggles of a Samoan immigrant couple making a life in this country.

The couple try to make sense of a Rubik cube containing the letters not found in the Samoan alphabet, or drag crosses through the landscape.

"I have heard the stories of that generation in words, but not visually. I think it is important there is some visual document," says Leleisi'uao, a self-taught artist who emerged from Mangere more than a decade ago to international acclaim.

While the show returns to some of the themes of earlier paintings, Leleisi'uao says there is a difference.

"The first time I did them I was angry. The second time the trick is to do it poetically."

Auckland City Art Gallery senior curator Ron Brownson says Lela'ulu and Leleisi'uao are important members of the emerging Pacific renaissance.

"Nanette has shown year after year, with her work just getting stronger," says Brownson.

"Andy has had more than 20 solo shows, and is known for expressing issues very much at the core of the first generation of immigrant artists.

"He is looking at what happened in the 1950s and 1960s when Pacific people came here to work, bringing their island's ethics and morality, and the tensions that brings with New Zealand and with their children."

Exhibition

*Who: Nanette Lela'ulu, Andy Leleisi'uao

*Where and when: Whitespace,

12 Crummer Rd, Grey Lynn, to Oct 21