From the Pacific we learn: Yuki Kihara’s Paradise Camp and a critical pedagogy of queer joy.

A review of Darwin in Paradise Camp. Yuki Kihara, The Sainsbury Centre, 15 Mar.–3 Aug. 2025, University of East Anglia, Norwich, United Kingdom.

Abstract

Yuki Kihara’s exhibition Darwin in Paradise Camp premiered in Norwich, UK, at the Sainsbury Centre, combining Paradise Camp, first shown in the New Zealand pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2022, with Darwin Drag (2025), along with other pieces that show the process behind Kihara’s work. I suggest her work comes together to create a reeducation experience, despite its primary purpose being to recognise and honour Kihara’s community. The exhibition is in the final room of several rooms that make up the season at the Sainsbury Centre titled Can the Seas Survive Us? Kihara’s engagement with climate change, colonisation and gender in Sāmoa and Aotearoa New Zealand offers an opportunity, for those open to it, for reeducation (or unlearning), within a broader context of contemplating our responsibilities to one another and our aquatic environments. Alongside the fa‘afāfine and fa‘afatama people featured in Kihara’s work—meaning in the manner of a woman and in the manner of a man in Sāmoa—we are taught to rethink the epistemic foundations of art and science: specifically, the way European artists portrayed their Pacific subjects in expressionist early twentieth-century works (i.e., Gauguin) and what Darwin omitted from his findings, leaving out the many Pacific fish species that have the capacity to change sex/gender. Kihara thus takes on the “old white men” who have been so influential in shaping European ways of thinking and seeing. She “upcycles” their work and ideas through the re-representation of fa‘afāfine and fa‘afatama communities in the Pacific, specifically Sāmoa. With humour and wit, Kihara includes us in her decolonial critique and reeducates us with the queer joy and care of the fa‘afāfine and fa‘afatama community.