The history of tattoo art in Japan is deep-rooted and complex – and so is the cultural aversion to tattooed bodies, explains Brian Ashcraft, the author of a book on subject. Tonight, when the All Blacks take the field, they’ll likely be covering up. In order not to run afoul of Japanese cultural niceties, players … Read more
Another day, another flagrant rip-off of Māori taonga and intellectual property, this time in a middling video game. Don Rowe reports. When the developers of the world’s most popular strategy game decided to bring a fleshed-out Māori race into Civ IV, they consulted, among others, with the Māori New Zealand Arts & Crafts Institute, a … Read more
How dare our national airline continue to brand itself with Indigenous symbols while rejecting employees who wear those same symbols on their bodies, writes Leonie Pihama. As I sit at a conference on the island of Maui, I see tā moko and kākau (a Hawaiian form of moko) proudly worn by Indigenous Peoples. The power … Read more
Anthony Byrt reviews an impeccably researched but somewhat tortured biography of Theo Schoon – only possibly a great New Zealand artist, almost certainly an anti-Semitic, misogynist, pretentious, belly-aching bitch. Art history is a brutal discipline, which feeds off the corpses of nearly-rans: the artists and dealers and curators and muses and rivals who make up an … Read more
Pākehā life coach Sally Anderson came under fire for receiving moko kauae, as has the tā moko artist that gave it to her. Leonie Pihama looks at the difference between rights and privilege when it comes to wāhine Māori and moko kauae. This post was first published 24 May 2018. Over the past few days I … Read more