Telly Tuita is centre stage. To his left, The Immortal Tango of Love & War - Mars, the Roman God of War, and Venus, the opposing God of Love - in pop culture hues, the shine of ribbons and lycra set before Hikuleʻo, Tongan goddess of the world. In front of Tuita, a crowd has gathered for his artist talk at the 2023 Aotearoa Art Fair.
“Let’s start with a love story, of Bergman and Tongpop,” says Tuita. “We met last year, completely from different worlds I suppose, and not meeting each other physically until we finally connected in 2022. Every artist has different goals and one of my goals was to move to this country and to hopefully have representation, and so Bergman Gallery has become that dream ticked. And I hope we keep going on for many years – I really do.”
Ben Bergman, gallery director, was introduced to Tuita’s work by friend and colleague John McCormack. Bergman hunted out Tuita’s work online, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, shown at Toi Moroiki - Centre of Contemporary Art in 2020 and Tauranga Art Gallery in 2021, and decided he needed to meet the artist, to see the work in person.
Tuita’s Tongpop world is both easy and difficult to define. Like the artist himself, it overbrims with colour and connection, looks forwards and backwards and sideways, finds new ways of explaining the world we live in - a world where light and dark co-exist and overlap: love and war, dark and light, good and bad. And Tonga is the background to it all, Tuita’s base of knowing and being.
Tuita was given the tip to “write what you talk” to keep track of his self-proclaimed “masses of internal dialogue,” while completing a thesis for his Masters in Special Education (he also has a Bachelor in Fine Art and Art Education). It’s a tip he took on; words and measurements and thoughts scribbled all over the walls and floor of his studio in Lyall Bay, a room in the house he shares with his husband. At night, when the rest of the world is quiet and still, Tuita will be here working.
Tuita is very open about his journey to this point. At the art fair, he tells of his early life, born in Tonga in 1980 from a “fleeting love,” and left in the country with family but neither of his parents. At age 9 years, he was sent to Australia to live with the father he did not know, in a country whose language and customs were completely different. English language was gained as Tongan was lost. Tuita was whāngai’d to his Uncle and Aunty as a teenager, a new family that saw him presented with new opportunities. He went on to teach for 12 years, making the move to Aotearoa New Zealand after meeting his husband. In 2017, Tuita gave himself five years to work as a full-time artist. With that time now up it seems he is just getting started.
Tuita’s new series, The Immortal Tango of Love & War, began a couple of years ago as a small painting - “the appropriation of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus with Hikuleʻo.” The idea fermented and grew: love, with his husband; war with Covid, Syria, Ukraine; his early life - loved and unloved, family and no family. Last year Tuita completed the series, setting it up as a moment of theatre with photographer Nick Shackleton.
“Us artists all work in mysterious ways - this is just one of the ways an artist can work. I’ve called upon all the artists from past, present and future. From Tonga, from Europe, from New Zealand, from Australia, particularly the First Nations. You can’t see it but that’s all there,” Tuita explains.
While Tuita is a central figure on the stage of his work, he is always masked. The face, which tells and shows so much, is hidden; faceless like so many are, like the First Nations man Tuita saw dancing at school when he first moved to Australia, his teacher unable or unwilling to provide Tuita with the context of who this man was and where he was from. And the masks serve another purpose; it is not Tuita’s job to make the work easy - “I want to engage with you a bit more so I want you to work harder to see what’s behind that mask.”
To this end, Tuita provides endless layers of meaning. The works backdrops are constructed from brown paper bags on linen, or linen alone, reminiscent of tapa and then covered in ngatu designs, Tongpop iconography of kuli, lupe and palm trees. Hikule’o is always present - “She is like a full stop in my work. I like the weight she carries, even if she is in the background.” Set against this backdrop is Tuita’s lycra clad figures, Taú and ‘Ofa in classical poses, with their re-purposed costumes of shredded ngatu hair, cascading capes, feathers, spears, apple, sporan, light sabres and ribbons.
“Ribbons will be a continual element in my work,” says Tuita, memories of the smooth shiny objects worn in girl’s hair for special occasions, items that seemed so out of place with his Tongan environment, and again seen worn by wealthy farming folk in Australia. It was later that Tuita learnt that ribbons were traded for land in the early days of colonisation. Again, the light and the dark.
Accompanying The Immortal Tango of Love & War, are three connected series of paintings: Daughters of Venus – Angry Muses, Prince of Mars – Retired War Dogs, and Tongpop Tango’s The Three Graces. Some of what remains of Tuita’s Tongan language, FULE’I - FUCK YOU, KAI’ TA’E - EAT SHIT, LEMU - ASSHOLE, is there in Daughters of Venus, images “pulled straight from Gauguin” with Hikule’o alongside. And The Three Graces series, taken from Greek mythology, could be his three mothers - his birth mother, his step-mother, his Mum - “everything is connected in some way.”