n an early morning in 2008, before the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened for the day, the artist Yuki Kihara sat down across from two paintings by the French artist Paul Gauguin and inspected them in the hushed, empty gallery.
The Japanese and Samoan artist, who was exhibiting at the New York museum at the time, was particularly interested in "Two Tahitian Women," from 1899, which features two feminine figures in an Eden-like setting. One holds a flower and leans into her companion, who presents a tray of fruit to the viewer, but doesn't quite look up to meet the eye. Fourteen years after first seeing it, Kihara has "upcycled" -- or reinterpreted -- the painting, along with many of Gauguin's other artworks, in a photography series titled "Paradise Camp" for the Venice Biennale.
"It's not like reenactment or restaging, because when I say 'upcycling,' it means that I'm actually improving it from the original," Kihara said in a video call.
Kihara is the first Pacific Indigenous artist from Samoa's Fa'afafine community -- who are assigned male at birth but express a female identity -- to represent New Zealand at the prestigious global art show. In "Paradise Camp," curated by Natalie King, Kihara intertwines themes of LGBTQ+ rights, environmentalism, and decolonization. In her lush images, taken on Upolu Island in Samoa with a nearly 100-person cast and crew, she casts Fa'afafine in the starring roles, keeping the familiarity of Gauguin's compositions but shedding his exploitative perspective.
In modern art, Gauguin's colonial gaze of paradise has been formative. The painter, who died in 1903, spent a decade of his later life in French Polynesia exoticizing the young Indigenous women he encountered through a prolific number of canvases, and had predatory relationships with them as well -- a complicated legacy that was addressed in the exhibition "Gauguin Portraits" at the National Gallery in London in 2019. The teenage girls he painted included a 13-year-old named Teha'amana a Tahura, who experts believe to be his second wife, though her identity has been debated.