Alexander Lee: The Dream of Haere-pō
On view through July 31, 2022
IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts
Santa Fe, New Mexico
www.iaia.edu/museum
Alexander Lee’s (Hakka Chinese, Tahiti) mural “The Dream of the Haere-pō” is a study on time and on Indigenous transformation. It depicts in five sections, five tāpa’o (signs, markers), what Lee considers to be memory helpers and instruments for storytelling.
Lee created this mural to inspire viewers to question limiting expectations of what Indigenous art is. He invites artists to redraw a narrative through reclaiming visual signs and to write their own stories of time and space. With this mural, Lee hopes to inspire viewers to question the “Indigenous” and “Contemporary” labels as places of enclosure, and he invites them to imagine futures through an Indigenous perspective. The mural is part of Alexander Lee’s installation Te atua vahine mana ra o Pere (The Great Goddess Pere)—L’ Aube où les Fauves viennent se désaltérer.
[Image: Alexander Lee, The Dream of the Haere-pō (detail). Photo copyright 2021, Alexander Lee. All rights reserved.]
