Don’t Miss: “Darwin in Paradise Camp” at the Whitworth in Manchester

There’s a moment in “Yuki Kihara: Darwin in Paradise Camp” where Paul Gauguin asks Kihara what she plans to do with his paintings. Kihara, a Japanese-Sāmoan artist and a member of the Fa’afafine community, tells the French Post-Impressionist, who died in 1903 and is most famous for his paintings produced in French Polynesia, that she’s updating his work to counterbalance their misleading narrative about the Pacific Islands. She tells Gauguin that she wants him to see “your work through my eyes.”

This interaction is from a video, Talanoa between Yuki Kihara and Paul Gauguin, in which Kihara has a conversation with herself dressed as Gauguin. (A Talanoa is a word used in the Pacific to denote an inclusive, participatory and transparent dialogue.) The scene is typical of Kihara’s practice: a necessary reevaluation of the past through playful theatrics and camp aesthetics. Gauguin never set foot in Samoa but used Sāmoan photography from the 19th Century to inspire his paintings, which diluted the Pacific Islands and its various peoples into a monolithic generalization. Kihara ‘upcycles’ Gauguin’s work and creates what is the most visually striking part of “Darwin in Paradise Camp.” A series of 12 photographic tableaus based on Gauguin’s paintings take over a wall of the exhibition, each shot on location in Upolu Island, Samoa and using Fa’afafine models and production crew. (The Fa’afafine community are a third gender group in Samoa, assigned male at birth but who adopt female traits. The word Fa’afafine means “in the manner of a woman.”) These photographs are bold, bright and beautiful; a radical reclamation of identity and a rebuttal of Gauguin’s exoticizing gaze.

Some people may have seen the images before. In 2022, Kihara represented the Aotearoa New Zealand Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale with “Paradise Camp.” The exhibition has since toured Sydney (2023), Upolu Island (2024) and Norwich (2025). Now, the show is at the Whitworth, a gallery in Manchester’s university district, and there’s a new video in “Darwin in Paradise Camp” that lends the exhibition its name and which again sees Kihara embody a figure from the 19th Century who has shaped our understanding of culture and gender.

Audiences watch Darwin Drag, the new 10-minute film, on a screen inside a fale, a Samoan thatched house that has been erected in the middle of the exhibition space. Kihara dons prosthetics and dresses up as Charles Darwin. We see Kihara’s Darwin conversing with the famous Sāmoan drag queen BUCKWEAT, confiding that he’s unhappy about keeping the secret of queer species of animal in the closet for so long (he’s scared of “being cancelled by the Victorian establishment”) before being transformed into a mermaid. Darwin, now dragged and glam and underwater, tells the camera about the ‘Fa’afafine traits’ found in the ocean surrounding the Sāmoan archipelago, for instance as seen in clownfish and parrotfish. Just as Kihara’s earlier work raises the point that Gauguin generalized all Pacific cultures into one, Darwin Drag critiques the role that Western science has played in distorting our understanding of gender and sexuality—and not just in the animal kingdom. Both historically and today, the oversimplification of Western knowledge systems erodes indigenous gender identities like Kihara’s. The film is funny and a little absurd but the point it raises is serious and central to Kihara’s practice.

Elsewhere in the show, there are artifacts on walls and in display cabinets. In Kihara’s Vārchive, we see evidence of her own research, as if the exhibition wants us to see the evolution of Kihara’s thinking. There are photographs of Kihara seeing Gauguin’s work for the first time at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. A first edition of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species sits in a display cabinet. A Princess Cruises advert using Gauguin’s paintings, promising “exotic adventures,” shows the prevalence of Gauguin’s imagination in how we see that part of the world. These objects, some biographical and others historical, serve to reinforce the central message that the way peoples, nations and identities are presented to us by power matters. Power doesn’t just mean colonial powers but also those people who mold public opinion through knowledge and art. People like Darwin and Gauguin.

Kihara describes “Paradise Camp” as a “Fa’afafine utopia” where indigenous and queer perspectives are centered and celebrated. The small exhibition is indeed bright, colorful and joyful, despite confronting themes of colonialism and climate change. Before engaging with the work itself, one is immediately struck when entering “Darwin in Paradise Camp” by the fale in the middle of the room, as well as the wallpaper: one half of the show is covered in a traditional Sāmoan siapo print while the other features a vibrant image of a Sāmoan beach. The show feels like a moment of celebration rather than of anger. There was a moment before I left “Paradise Camp” that stayed with me. As I was about to leave, I turned around and saw a woman and child sitting in the fale, watching Darwin Drag. The child couldn’t have been older than five. The pair, presumably mother and child, watched Darwin in drag explain how hermaphroditism is common among fish species. It was a beautiful moment and a reminder that the way we interact with knowledge and perspectives helps shape our worldviews. One hopes that the show will create empathy and deeper understanding of identity among British viewers. For children, these things may one day seem obvious.

“Darwin in Paradise Camp” is at the Whitworth through March 1, 2026.

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