ABSTRACT
John Pule is one of the most significant artists living and working in the Pacific today. As is the case with many indigenous Pacific creative practitioners, Pule's work has been inflected by the legacies of British and American imperialism in the Pacific, as well as drawing extensively on indigenous Pacific histories and cultures, particularly those of Polynesia. From the mid-1990s, Pule's powerful and highly personal paintings attracted great interest, and his work came to be widely shown both within and beyond New Zealand. This chapter foregrounds Pule as a commentator upon history. His work does not emerge from any conventional 'nativism'; that is, he does not privilege the traditions of his particular community or see them as a source of self-definition or identity. The chapter tracks the signs and motifs through Pule's oeuvre but is largely dedicated to a sustained discussion of several recent paintings that record a new focus on the Anglo-British 'war on terror'.
