There is a moment in “Yuki Kihara: Darwin in Paradise Camp” where Paul Gauguin asks Kihara what he plans to do with his paintings. Kihara, a Japanese-Sāmoan painter and member of the Fa’afafine community, tells the French Post-Impressionist, who died in 1903 and is most famous for his paintings produced in French Polynesia, that he is revising his work to counter their misleading narrative about the Pacific islands. He tells Gauguin that he wants him to see “your work with my eyes.”
This engagement comes from a video, Talanoa between Yuki Kihara and Paul Gauguinwhen Kihara has a conversation with him dressed as Gauguin. (Talanoa is a term used in the Pacific to denote inclusive, participatory and transparent dialogue.) The scene is Kihara’s practice: a necessary re-examination of the past through theatrics and camp aesthetics. Gauguin never set foot in Samoa but used 19th century Sāmoan images to inspire his paintings, which distilled the Pacific Islands and their diverse people into a monolithic generalization. Kihara ‘raises’ Gauguin’s work and creates the most beautiful part of “Darwin in Paradise Camp.” A series of 12 portrait tables based on Gauguin’s paintings take up one wall of the exhibition, each shot on location in Upolu Island, Samoa and using models by Fa’afafine and the production team. (The Fa’afafine community is a third gender group in Samoa, assigned male at birth but embracing female characteristics. The name Fa’afafine means “in a woman’s way.”) These images are bold, bright and beautiful; a strong reiteration of identity and a rebuttal of Gauguin’s paradoxical view.
Some people may have seen the pictures before. In 2022, Kihara represented the Aotearoa New Zealand Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale with “Paradise Camp.” The show has traveled to Sydney (2023), Pole Island (2024) and Norwich (2025). Now, the show is at the Whitworth, a gallery in Manchester’s university district, and there’s a new video “Darwin in Paradise Camp” that lends the show its name and also sees Kihara embody the 19th-century figure who shaped our understanding of culture and sexuality.
The audience is watching Darwin Draga new 10-minute film, on a screen inside the fale, a Samoan thatched house built at the center of the exhibition. Kihara wears prosthetics and dresses like Charles Darwin. We see Kihara’s Darwin talking to the famous Sāmoan queen BUCKWEAT, confiding that she is unhappy about keeping the exotic species a secret for so long (she fears being “cancelled by the Victorian establishment”) before she is transformed into a mermaid. Darwin, now dragged and glowing underwater, tells the camera about the ‘Fa’afafine features’ found in the sea around the Sāmoan archipelago, for example as seen in clownfish and parrotfish. Just as Kihara’s earlier work makes the point that Gauguin homogenizes all Pacific cultures, Darwin Drag criticizes the role played by Western science in distorting our understanding of sex and sexuality—and not just in animals. Both historically and today, the oversimplification of Western knowledge systems destroys traditional gender like Kihara’s. The film is funny and silly but the point it makes is serious and central to Kihara’s acting.
Elsewhere in the exhibition, there are artifacts on the walls and display cabinets. In Kihara’s Vārchive, we see evidence of her research, as if the show wants us to see the evolution of Kihara’s thinking. There are photos of Kihara seeing Gauguin’s work for the first time at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Darwin’s first edition On the Origin of Species you live in a display cabinet. A Princess Cruises ad that uses Gauguin’s paintings, promising “extraordinary events,” shows the pervasiveness of Gauguin’s thought in the way we see that part of the world. These elements, some historical and some ahistorical, serve to reinforce the central message of how people, nations and identities are presented through objects of power. Power does not only mean colonial power but also those people who shape public opinion through knowledge and art. People like Darwin and Gauguin.
Kihara describes “Paradise Camp” as a “Fa’afafine utopia” where indigenous and non-traditional ideas are centered and celebrated. This little show is really bright, colorful and fun, despite dealing with themes of colonialism and climate change. Before engaging with the work itself, one is immediately caught upon entering “Darwin in Paradise Camp” by the fale in the middle of the room, and the wallpaper: one part of the exhibition is covered with a traditional Sāmoan siapo print while the other has a bold image of the Sāmoan sea. The show feels like a moment of celebration instead of anger. There was a moment before I left the “Paradise Camp” that stayed with me. I was about to leave when I turned around and saw a woman and a child sitting in the field watching Darwin Drag. The child could not be older than five. The two, possibly mother and child, watched as Darwin dragged on explaining how common hermaphroditism was among fish species. It was a great moment and a reminder that the way we interact with information and ideas helps shape our worldviews. One hopes that the program will create empathy and a deeper understanding of identity among British viewers. For children, these things may seem obvious one day.
“Darwin Paradise Camp” is at the Whitworth until March 1, 2026.
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