Award-winning artist blurs boundaries of race and gender

By EMILY WATT

When I first call artist Shigeyuki Kihara, she is in a fabric shop choosing cloth to make an outfit for an awards ceremony. On Monday night, Kihara was awarded Creative New Zealand's $3000 Emerging Pacific Islands Artist Award.

She was planning to make a piece of art to wear - or rather, as she says, going as a piece of art.

When we later meet, in her large airy studio on Auckland's Karangahape Rd, it is immediately clear what she means. Kihara is someone who skews the commonplace. She is someone who could go to a party and be art.

But she does not appear the stereotypical young artist, with not a dreadlock or a musty T-shirt in sight. Petite and pretty, she has a funky urban look, with long glossy hair and perfectly manicured fingernails, which she taps on the table when she gets animated. At one stage as we talk she reaches across and pulls some lint from my clothes.

In fact, Kihara eludes stereotype of any kind, both professionally and personally. In a world that defines people in terms of antitheses - of gender, race, religion, sexuality - she defies easy description.

Kihara was born in Apia to a Samoan Catholic mother and a Japanese Buddhist father. She lived in Indonesia for her first five years, then moved to Japan. When she was 12, her family relocated to Samoa, opening the country's first Japanese restaurant. It is hard to imagine a more brutal cultural shift. "I was faced with absolute culture shock - mentally speaking, emotionally speaking, physically and spiritually speaking, it was a big shocker."

At the age of 16, she moved to New Zealand. When asked which culture she identifies with now, her reply is swift and certain: "All of them". She clarifies that. "The thing is, with both Samoan and Japanese culture I have felt dislocated from both and I still sometimes feel dislocated from New Zealand."

She also blurs the traditional dichotomies of gender and sexuality. Kihara is a fa'afafine, translated as "like a woman" - a biological male who lives as a female. She says there are a lot of misconceptions about fa'afafine in New Zealand. In Samoa, fa'afafine hold their own place in society, a valued member of the social fabric. In New Zealand, their position is not so clear.

"I felt very comfortable just being the way I am until I came to New Zealand and I was faced with all these misconceptions and misunderstandings from people."

But she says her occupation of peripheries gives her art an unusual vantage point. "I feel dislocated from everything, but I am everything. I use the advantage of being an insider and an outsider."

Even Kihara's art defies categorisation, merging photography, fashion, illustration, design and performance. It is often satirical, parodying stereotypes, and the thread that weaves throughout her work is an attempt for self-definition.

"For me, I'm trying to find a sense of place, of meaning, for where I am now. By doing so, I also seek what's in store for me in the future. There's that saying: you won't know where you're going unless you know where you're from. Know the past to see the future."

If her past is anything to go by, her future is bright indeed.

Kihara studied fashion, completing an advanced diploma course in fashion design at Wellington Polytech (now Massey University) in 1996. But from the start, her designs sought to merge fashion and art in an attempt to define herself.

"When I was at fashion school, a lot of the work I was producing at the time was idea- and concept-based and it reflected my environment. I was more about making a collection that reflected who I was and where I came from."

She started making waves from an early stage, and in 1995 Te Papa Tongarewa purchased one of her second-year designs, Graffiti Dress. She attracted the attention of the national museum again in 2000 with her exhibition entitled Teuanoa'i, Adorn to Excess, which was again purchased by Te Papa. The collection of 28 T-shirts, some vacuum-sealed and displayed in a fridge like supermarket meat, others branded with bastardised corporate logos, received attention when Te Papa withdrew three T-shirts from the display for fear of legal action. Kihara accused the companies involved of lacking a sense of humour.

Her work continues to cover diverse terrains. As a performer, Kihara travels regularly with Pasifika Divas, a performance art group of fa'afafine, who challenge cultural constructions of gender and sexuality. In August, she also contributed a solo performance for an exhibition The Other Day in Paradise at K Rd adult shop The Den, exploring similar themes.

In 2002, she co-curated a jewellery exhibition d'Tail, inviting 20 local and offshore designers to create jewellery. She slipped into the role of performer there, too, modelling John Ione's dead octopus creation for two hours during a live fashion show of the works after the model who was supposed to wear it pulled out in fright.

But thus far, her art has focused predominantly on themes of the Pacific. As a freelance fashion stylist, she has created fashion editorials for Pulp, Staple and Pavement magazines, work that continues to reference her culture, taking locally designed clothes and placing them in urban Pacific or colonial settings.

Her most recent works, entitled Fale Aitu, House of Spirits, are a set of photographic portraits of Kihara in Samoan costume, based on the traditional performances in which Samoan men take on different personas to perform comedic skits. The images, large, dark and glistening, speak of cultural identity issues, gender, religion, sexuality, and social roles, themes, she believes, that anyone can relate to. "Although my concepts stem from a cultural platform, a lot of the issues that I speak about in my work, I believe to be universal."

They are themes which she comes back to, using different mediums to explore. "What I do in my visual art informs what I do with my performance art so it's basically channelling to another medium."

She later telephones to elucidate the point, describing the process as "finding other mediums to express what I'm trying to say".

And Kihara is careful with what she says. She often pauses to make clear the correct terminology to describe her art and herself. She also declines to be photographed, offering instead to send one of her art works.

The reasons for her caution are fairly clear. A search for articles about her rendered two previous interviews - one, in an Australian art magazine, is almost reverential. The other, from a New Zealand Sunday newspaper, snide. The latter stung.

"As you can see I'm very careful about what I'm doing. I've actually had journalists reinterpret everything just to sell the paper, so I'm always careful. There's a lot of things that are interesting about me and people can go all out, go crazy and have a circus with it."

For Kihara, living life as an enigma, as no thing but every thing, is both a trial and a blessing. "I am aware that I do have these experiences a lot of people can't relate to, but I believe I am fortunate to have these sort of experiences because it makes me understand the world more.

"I might come across as complex to a lot of people but it's something that I've lived with, that's always been there. So I have my own equations to cope with it, to deal with it. And creating art is part of that evolution."

* The other recipients of the Creative New Zealand Arts Pasifika Awards 2003 are: Auckland writer Albert Wendt - Senior Pacific Islands Artists Award; Auckland opera singer Daphne Collins - Iosefa Enari Memorial Award; New Plymouth sculptor Filipe Tohi - Pacific Innovation and Excellence Award.