John Pule
Celebrated Niuean artist John Pule creates works that are at once intensely personal, historic and mythological, registering a range of material and conceptual influences in a deeply considered lexicon of motifs and figurative images.
Image credit: John Pule, Mioimioi, 2023, ink, oil stick and acrylic on paper, 152 x 106.5 cm. Courtesy the artist and Gow Langsford Gallery
John Pule is a Renaissance man on multiple levels. Born in Niue, he emigrated at the age of three to Auckland, Aotearoa, arguably the de facto capital of Polynesia. Today, Pule is a central figure in the great global flowering of contemporary Pasifika culture.
“The Pacific Renaissance,” says Pule, “burst forth from many plateaus in Polynesian memory. In Pacific thinking, this memory of many capillaries has a deep connection to storage rooms, museums, mother, father, family, migration. Many songs die at the doors of state housing, welfare benefits and religion. What it means to me is the way I look for knowledge about my own culture and what this research means to how I want to live my life.”
Almost entirely self-taught, Pule is a master of both the literary and visual arts. He is a celebrated novelist, poet and artist, having been a University of Auckland Literary Fellow, a University of Hawai’i writer-in-residence, an artist-in-residence at the Galerie Römerapotheke in Basel, Switzerland and an Ursula Bethell writer-in-residence at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch. He was made an Arts Foundation of New Zealand Laureate in 2004, and in 2012 became an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit during the Queen’s Birthday and Diamond Jubilee Honours for services to literature and art. His work has been featured in three Asia Pacific Triennials in Brisbane (1996, 2002 and 2006), the 2007 Auckland Triennial, the Gwangju Biennale in South Korea and the Johannesburg Biennale in South... Subscribe to read all articles in full
