John Pule

Biography

The cover of the catalogue for the 2006 Asia Pacific Triennial at the Queensland Art Gallery carried John Pule’s painting “Forever and Ever” (2005). Its Niuean title, “Tukulagi tukumuitea”, means “for ever and ever”. By then Pule was taking part in the triennial for the third time, after 1996 and 2002.

He was born on 18 April 1962 in the village of Liku on Niue, and in 1964 he came to New Zealand. He was educated at Mount Albert Grammar School in Auckland, and after leaving worked on a dairy farm and in factories, taking on any labouring job. He began with poetry: “Sonnets to Van Gogh and Providence” came out in 1982, “Flowers after the Sun” in 1984, and the long love poem “The Bond of Time” in 1985 (later reissued twice, in 1998 and 2014). He called writing a way of decolonising his own mind. He wanted to tell what it was like to grow up in New Zealand while thinking of Niue, and admitted that at first he did not know how to organise his material and simply started writing.

His first novel, “The Shark that Ate the Sun”, appeared in 1992; it contains episodes from his early life and the experience of immigration. It was followed by “Burn My Head in Heaven” (2000) and “Restless People” (2004). Out of the second novel grew a series of ten drawings with the same title: lines of prose are combined in them with images, and together they tell what it is like to be at once Niuean and New Zealander.

He has exhibited since 1991: in New Zealand, Australia, Europe, the United States, the Pacific islands and Asia. Since 1996 he has had regular solo shows in New Zealand and at the Karen Woodbury Gallery in Melbourne. His group projects include the Kwangju and Johannesburg biennales (both 1995), “Paradise Now!” at the Asia Society Museum in New York (2004), the 3rd Auckland Triennial (2007), and the South Pacific Arts Festivals in Samoa, New Caledonia and Palau. In 2010 City Gallery Wellington put together his exhibition “Arrivals” (in Niuean, “Hauaga”), which then toured other New Zealand galleries. He works in painting, drawing, printmaking, film and performance.

The “Pulenoa Triptych” deals with colonisation and cultural identity. Pule explained that he wanted to voice his concern at the way America and France test nuclear weapons and the “Star Wars” programme, using the ocean right by his home as a testing ground. It seems to me that this remark shows well how the personal and the political meet in his work: the ocean is, above all, his own backyard.

He has studied the traditional Niuean painting on bark cloth, hiapo, both as an artist and as a researcher. In 2005, together with the Australian anthropologist Nicholas Thomas, he wrote the book “Hiapo: Past and Present in Niuean Barkcloth”.

Literature and painting have run side by side for him. In 2000 he was the University of Auckland Literary Fellow; in the spring of 2002 he taught creative writing as a visiting professor at the University of Hawaiʻi; in 2005 he received an art residency at the Römerapotheke in Switzerland; and in 2013 the Ursula Bethell Residency in Creative Writing at the University of Canterbury. In 2004 the Arts Foundation of New Zealand gave him its Laureate Award, and in 2012 he was appointed an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit as an author, poet and painter. His poems were included in “UPU”, a collection of texts by Pacific writers presented at the Auckland Arts Festival in 2020 and staged again at the Kia Mau Festival in Wellington in 2021.

Pule’s work is held by the Queensland Art Gallery, the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Auckland Art Gallery, the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington, the Wellington High Court building and the National Museum of Scotland.