- About the Artist:Visesio Poasi Siasau
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Visesio Poasi Siasau—or Sio, as he likes to be called—comes from a hereditary guild of Tongan tufunga or tohunga. He self-identifies as a tufunga‘i practitioner and draws on Tongan epistemologies as his pathway to understanding things passed down by traditional knowledge keepers. Indeed, his efficacy as an indigenous practitioner is worldly in a contemporary sense within knowing in a traditional sense.
A promising artist of his generation, Sio’s creative ambitions are directed toward the sculpted wooden Tongan divinity forms, which he remakes in a range of styles, stances, and materials including Perspex, glass, stone, wood, and bronze. His twenty-first century approach to an old form presents a challenge for contemporary Tongan Christian politics, as he is critical of the Church’s negative impact on Tongan stories, thinking, and traditional ways of life. Furthermore, his sculptures carry a message beyond his politics: they hold and express his personal responsibility for teaching specialized knowledge.
Sio’s art practice delves into the context of divinity figures in order to explore their making, meaning, and function in Tongan society and the intersection between this type of deity and Christianity. Thus, the form comes with uncertainty regarding its status as a ceremonial object, a post-contact emblem, a symbol of contempt, or something imbued with ancient knowledge. Sio has sympathetically carried the early nineteenth century figures into the present-day, perhaps unwittingly claiming a position for historic circumstance within a milieu of Western happenstance and interpretations of indigenous forms. The vitality found in Sio’s sculptures is present, palpable, and physical. These things appeal to our heart, mind, and spirit. [End Page vii]
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