Darwin in Paradise Camp: Yuki Kihara

Darwin in Paradise Camp: Yuki Kihara

The Sainsbury Centre is proud to host the UK premiere of Paradise Camp, a celebrated work by Yuki Kihara (b.1975), an interdisciplinary artist of Sāmoan and Japanese descent, which will be exhibited alongside newly commissioned work titled Darwin Drag.

Previously presented at the Aotearoa New Zealand Pavilion in the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022, Paradise Camp upcycles the works of French painter Paul Gauguin (1848–1903). Through archival research, Kihara believes Gauguin’s paintings made during his time in Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands were inspired by colonial photographs taken in Sāmoa.

Kihara recasts past narratives by using Fa’afafine models – a third gender community in Sāmoa, to which Kihara also belongs – in colourful, hyperreal photographs reflecting Gauguin’s compositions. Darwin in Paradise Camp will feature original works by Gauguin alongside Kihara’s Paradise Camp for the very first time.

Paradise Camp will be augmented by Kihara’s ground-breaking new work, Darwin Drag. Following new research by Ross Brooks, Kihara’s project, which reveals how famed evolutionary biologist Charles Darwin (1809–1882), shaped some of his findings and suggested non-heteronormative species and same-sex attraction in animals was rare and unnatural, to conform with the conservative values of the Victorian period.

Darwin’s evolutionary theories and queer aesthetics in the animal ‘queendom’ inspired Kihara to create Darwin Drag – a video work featuring Kihara herself prosthetically transformed as Charles Darwin, who confides in a renown Sāmoan drag queen, BUCKWEAT, that he has been unhappy keeping his secret in the closet about queer species for so long.

Darwin Drag will also introduce the fish species with ‘Fa’afafine traits’ found in the ocean surrounding the Sāmoan archipelago, including clownfish and parrotfish. Darwin Drag will be presented alongside corresponding fish specimens, on loan from the Natural History Museum.

Incorporating wallpaper, Kihara’s own works, historical artworks and specimens plus archival material, the exhibition will shed new light on figures of the past and celebrate the radical perspective of this important artist of today.

The exhibition foregrounds how a closer relationship between humanity and the seas can save the communities most at risk of the human-caused impact on the seas, as well as the seas themselves

Supported by: British Council and AHRC Impact Acceleration Account administered by UEA. 

Darwin in Paradise Camp is part of a six-month season of interlinked exhibitions and events that explore the question Can the Seas Survive Us?

Image: Yuki Kihara, Two Fa’afafine on the Beach (after Gauguin) (2020)