With his extensive portraiture of African Americans, Kehinde Wiley made a name for himself in the arts scene stateside, but it wasn’t until he put the very same subjects in traditional settings of Old Master paintings that the artist firmly anchored himself in the international arts scene while also becoming a protagonist of sorts of Black Culture. But now, Wiley has shifted his artistic focus to a different ethnicity halfway across the planet. Currently on at Galerie Templon in Paris is Tahiti – Kehinde Wiley, an exhibition of new portraits with a focus on Tahiti‘s Māhū community, the traditional Polynesian classification of people of a third gender, between male and female.The Māhū were highly respected within their society until they were banned by Catholic and Protestant missionaries. Wiley’s portraits of beautiful, transgender Tahitian women reference and confront Paul Gauguin‘s celebrated works, which also feature subjects from the transgender community, but are in fact fraught with historical undertones of colonialism and sexual objectification. Building off of Wiley’s earlier portraits which addressed issues of masculine identity and virility, these new portraits explore issues of identity through the lens of transformation, exploring both artifice and artificiality as a trans-cultural phenomenon. In tandem with the exhibition, a video-installation based on his time spent this past year in Tahiti is put on display (on through Jul 20).
Galerie Templon
28 rue du Grenier Saint-Lazare (Marais)
75003 Paris
Telephone: +33 1 85765555
Tue-Sat 10-7
Publishers Note
Just to be clear – superfuture® is a design blog and not a political commentator. No surprise there. The scope of our content has always been global and borderless, however that can often mean covering projects in countries where we will not agree with the politics or actions of those countries. In a world that’s as screwed up as ever right now, the focus of our support is to those designers, architects and other creatives who aim to make the world a more liveable one – as opposed to people that try their hardest to destroy it. So if a project hits our desk and we like it based on its design credentials, we may choose to publish regardless of its location or creators nationality. superfuture® has always been inclusive and hopes for all current wars, aggression, violence, hate and extremism to end.
