‘Chief’s Daughter’ (2025) by Yuki Kihara

Artist Statement

The title of the series 酋長の娘 (Shūchō no musume) or ‘Chief’s Daughter’ is lifted from the same title of a popular song composed by Ichimatsu Ishida in the early 1920s. The song describes a Japanese soldier falling in love with a daughter of a chief of natives living in the Marshall Islands. The song allegorizes Japanese colonial aggression during the Nan'yō period in Japan, which ruled the South Sea Islands from 1914 to 1945.

The exoticization of a native woman in the song resonates with the European colonial trope of the ‘duskymaiden’ which signifies the Moana Pacific as the Other (1), commonly depicted in early colonial accounts; to cinema and tourism paraphernalia including racialized ‘hula’ dolls. 酋長の娘 alludes to how Japan adopted the ‘duskymaiden’ trope through the framework of European racial hierarchy and patriarchy by imposing similar distorted images and narratives against the people and the places it occupied during the Nan'yō period. (2)

In pre-contact Sāmoa, shells were often worshipped as a symbol of an ancestor. This alludes to the cultural and spiritual connection that Sāmoa has with the surrounding ocean, seen as a space that connects to a vast network of islands across the region prior to being divided up into sub-regions as a result of imperial interests (3). Subsequently, the shells were sourced from the Moana Pacific Ocean, which is the same ocean where Fukushima radioactive water is being released. The Nan'yō period may have ended, yet the colonial legacy continues to influence the way Japan positions itself geopolitically in the Moana Pacific as its closest geographical neighbour. 

Each work in the series are named in honour of Samoan goddesses related to the ocean. These names also serves as chiefly titles bestowed onto a taupou or a daughter of a Samoan chief, who is placed in high regard and play a crucial role in representing her clan and performing traditional ceremonies. The works aims to reclaim marginalized histories and contribute to the broader movement of reimagining and decolonizing our world.

— Yuki Kihara 

  1. Tamaira, M. A. 2010. From Full Dusk to Full Tusk: Reimagining the "Dusky Maiden" through the Visual Arts. The Contemporary Pacific 22 (1): 1-35.

  2. Lee, K. 2014. The emergence of the modern Kisaeng and its representational space. Past, Present and Future: Daegu Photo Biennale’s International Photography Symposium. 24-30. Lee Kyungmin states ‘Japan’s racism was unlike the racism from the West. The western world gave a quasi-scientific explanation of how the white man has superior due to its skin colour and facial structure. Japan was highly aware of the Western view of the East and acknowledged their biological inferiority. They knew they couldn’t overcome those views to prove their superiority, so they pushed forward a new ethnology where the evaluation criteria for racial superiority was modernity’.  

  3. Hau'ofa, E. 1994. Our Sea of Islands. The Contemporary Pacific. 148-61.

Exhibition Dates

‘CAMP’
Ota Fine Arts
Japan
15 March - 26 April 2025
https://www.otafinearts.com