Yuki Kihara was born in Samoa in 1975. Her mother is Samoan and her father is Japanese. She is also fa’afafine, the third gender of Samoa. She moved with her family to New Zealand when she was 15 to study Fashion Design at Massey Unversity.
Her practice is interdisciplinary and she works across a range of media including photography, performance and video. She has built a comprehensive body of work that examines issues relating to gender roles, consumerism and the past, present and future societal issues from colonial and post-colonial perspectives.
In 2008, her work was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. This was the first time a New Zealander had been the subject of one-person show at the institution. Titled Shigeyuki Kihara: Living Photographs, the exhibition ran from October 2008 to February 2009. The portrait photographs in the exhibitions included nudes in poses that portrayed colonial images of Polynesian people as sexual objects. Her exhibition was followed by an acquisition of Kihara’s work for the museum’s collection.
Yuki Kihara is New Zealand’s representative at the 2022 Venice Biennale and is the first Pasifica, Asian and trans artist to represent New Zealand at the event. Her work can be found in many national and international collections.
