New Portraits of Tahiti’s Third Gender Challenge Paul Gaugin’s Depictions

Andrew Lasane of Colossal writes about depictions of the transgender community of the Māhū of Polynesia (I am using the word transgender as an umbrella term for gender variance here):

American artist Kehinde Wiley (previously) has unveiled a new series of paintings of Tahiti’s Māhū community, a group of Polynesians classified as a third gender between male and female. Presented at Galerie Templon in Paris, the colorful portrait series challenges a collection of 20th century works by Paul Gauguin, removing elements that Wiley considers problematic and exploitative side effects of colonialism.

The famous French painter Paul Gaugin made paintings of Māhū while on Tahiti, the most famous probably being the The Sorcerer of Hiva Oa, where the gender ambiguity of the person depicted is probably illustrated by the fox and the bird in the corner. The person is most likely a shaman or a healer, and not a sorcerer, as Gaugin implied.

Gaugin is a master artist and I this is clearly a great painting. That is not the issue Wiley brings up. 

Wiley thinks Gauguin’s depictions of the Māhū are unrealistic fantasies that sexually objectify the community for the sake of his white audience back home.

Here are some examples of the Wiley Māhū  paintings:

Kehinde Wiley (from Instagram):