FIG. 6 (above): God image,
akua hulu manu. Hawaiian
Islands. Before 1780.
Fiber, feathers, human hair, pearl
shell, seeds, dog teeth. H: 62 cm.
The British Museum,
inv. Oc,HAW.78.
Photo: The Trustees of the British
Museum.
71
from the London Missionary Society, who were
active in the region from 1797 onward. Maori
conversion to Christianity is attested in works
such as Patoromu Tamatea’s wood-and-shell
Madonna and Child carving created around
1840 (fig. 10), in which the status of Mary is indicated
by a ta moko, or facial marking, usually
reserved for men of high rank.
Cultural artifacts were later acquired in volume
as souvenirs by the nineteenth-century colo-
The final theme, “Encounter,” explores a
range of defining moments grounded in early indigenous
encounters that consumed rival clans
in interisland warfare and localized raids that
sought to settle disputes and restore cosmological
balance. The Enlightenment era of scientific
exploration, which began in earnest with Captain
Cook’s first voyage to the Pacific region in
1768—the year in which the Royal Academy of
Arts was founded by Royal Charter—launched
a dramatic new epoch of encounter between
the Oceanic cultures now long established in
the region and the emerging European nations
whose tall-masted ships now ventured into the
maritime theater of the Pacific. This colonial
encounter was, of course, seismic in scale, and
its reeling effects are still being processed by indigenous
peoples today. It kick-started an era
marked as much by misunderstanding, violence,
and tragedy as by the sharing and mutual curiosity
of “discovery.”
Now, 250 years later, the dynamics of power
that motivated this extraordinary collision
of two worlds have been creatively reimagined
in a video installation, in Pursuit of Venus infected
(2015–17), by leading Maori artist Lisa
Reihana (fig. 5). Inspired by a set of early nineteenth
century French wallpaper panels, Reihana
reconfigures their Eurocentric vision of an
exotic and largely acquiescent Pacific paradise
with a series of vignettes that celebrate the agency
and customary knowledge of contemporary
Islanders. These intriguing scenes unravel and
complicate the daily encounters that took place
on eighteenth-century Pacific beaches between
Islanders and Cook’s crew. Fraught with tension
and a constant backdrop of threatened violence,
the piece is peppered with humor and incident,
building in drama to end finally in tragedy.
Pacific artworks remain a vital cultural resource
for both sides of this extraordinary and
entangled era of encounter. Expansive in its vision,
Oceania gives visitors a strong sense of the
range of values that have been imposed over time
upon these singularly impressive objects. Those
brought back to England by early explorers such
as Cook lined the shelves of eighteenth-century
cabinets as specimens of intellectual curiosity.
Other works on view became salvaged trophies
that gauged the successes of English evangelicals
OCEANIA