Yuki Kihara: Moments of Presence | Milford Galleries, Queenstown

EXHIBITION DATES | 15 Nov - 14 Dec 2025

OPENING PREVIEW | 3:30–5:30pm, Saturday 15 November - all welcome

MILFORD GALLERIES | 58 Gorge Road

Combining two significant, on-going series of works, Yuki Kihara’s new exhibition Moments of Presence operates at the pliable borders of geography, history and time, as well as those of culture, gender and racial hierarchies.

Four new Aotea’ula garlands link butterflies across time and place to the fate of 27 unnamed men from the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu) who, in 1870, were blackbirded to New Zealand where they were forced to work in the flax mills of Auckland for a pittance. They never saw their homeland again. Acting plurally as adornment lei, memento mori and Pacific symbols of friendship, significant narrative layers emerge including dialogues about transience and nature alongside the poignancy of pattern and beauty.

Yuki Kihara’s critically acclaimed lenticular photographs feature herself as Salome, a time-travelling savant wearing a Victorian mourning-dress. Addressing the past and the present simultaneously, Kihara uses the discombobulating, mutating presence and absence enabled by the lenticular technique in quite remarkable, illuminating ways. Time seems fractured, the pictorial construct subverted in an almost ceaseless act of re-composition as the viewer watches and engages.

Conveyance of Time is paradoxically both simpler and more complex than a lenticular photograph yet – conceptually – it owes much to the process. Holding various Pacific cultural symbols and signifiers, Kihara wonderfully deepens the pictorial space by populating it while the waving, tendril arms of numerous Pohutukawa posit the scene as unmistakably New Zealand.

On 4 November 1918, the island trader, the Talune, sailing directly from Auckland, berthed at Apia, which was then fully controlled and occupied by New Zealand forces having been seized from Germany at the beginning of WW1. The New Zealand authorities there failed to apply any quarantine restrictions, allowing passengers including six already seriously ill to disembark. Within a week the influenza epidemic already sweeping New Zealand took hold, resulting in the deaths of over 8,500 Samoans, one fifth of the entire population. As if almost forgotten, the commemorative monument indelibly marked by the declines and neglects of time, is witnessed by a contemplative Salome as she addresses all who were complicit and those interred in Mass Grave, Vaimoso