John Pule - Profile

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+ 14 Exhibitions
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Most exhibitions in:
Country	№
New Zealand	8
Australia	2
USA	2

Most exhibitions shown with:
Artist	Rank	№
Shane Cotton	6369	5
Michael Parekowhai	3303	4

Most exhibitions held at:
Institution		№
	Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu, New Zealand	2
	Wellington City Gallery, New Zealand	2

Biography:

Courtesy by "Galerie Römerapotheke, Zürich"

1962 Born in Liku (NU)

PULE, John Puhiatau (1962- ), was born in Liku, Niue, and arrived in New Zealand in 1964. He began writing in 1980 after reading the work of Hone *Tuwhare, and has published poetry including Sonnets to Van Gogh and Providence (1982), Flowers after the Sun (1984) and Bond of Time (1985). He took up painting in 1987 with the encouragement of artist Tony Fomison, his dual interests coming together in the late 1980s in a series of paintings of texts in Nuiean which confronted his audience with evidence of his cultural difference. Since his first return trip to Niue in 1991, Pule has taken increased interest in the history, mythology and make-up of his country of origin. This is registered in his painting, which now typically takes the form and employs the colour range of Nuiean tapa, and in his novel, The Shark That Ate the Sun: Ko E Mago Ne Kai E La (1992), one of the most significant texts of the immigrant *Pacific community.

This combines sequences of historical, mythical, genealogical and autobiographical narrative. The varied languages of these entangled stories are frequently visionary and poetic as they describe the journeying, survival under difficulty, and the alofa among a migrant Niuean family. A prologue takes the reader into an ecstatic present, releasing images of loss and rebirth, city and village, and introducing the novel's themes of anti-colonialism, anti-nuclear protest, desire, family ties and violence. The first of the novel's three main sections comprises letters between family members, with prose and poetic pieces that contrast life in Niue and New Zealand. Part Two is a lush, lyrical and erotic thirty-poem sequence set on nineteenth-century Niue. The narrator of the third section describes his home, school, work and prison experiences in various suburbs of Auckland, interspersed with a chapter of legends which emphasises the disjunction between migrant life and the mythical *Pacific and reconnects the characters to that past. A spiritual poem combining Christian and Niuean symbols forms the epilogue.

BW/CB
Awards 2005 New Zealand Art Laureate, New Zealand

Lives and works in Auckland (NZ)

Public exhibitions 15

Solo shows 2

2005