Greg Semu: The Battle of the Noble Savage

City Gallery Wellington | Te Whare Toi

Deane Gallery: 6 August–6 November 2011

Commissioned by Paris’ Museé du Quai Branly, Greg Semu’s photograpic series entitleed The Battle of the Noble Savage (2007) responds to the Bonded by Blood poster gifted to Quai Branly to commemorate the All Black’s 2006 tour of France and the 2007 World Cup. The poster depicts the All Blacks performing the haka in a tropical rainforest. As a promotional strategy, the designers bonded the players’ blood into the image in the printing process. Semu’s response offers fictitious scenes of Māori ‘warriors’ engaged in battle, seemingly celebrating the Māori fighting spirit while addressing the objectionable stereotypes of Pacific people as ‘primitives’ and ‘savages’. Recalling colonial-period paintings by Louis J. Steele, Nicholas Chevalier, Walter Wright, Charles F. Goldie, and others, The ‘Battle of the Noble Savage offers a satirical take on the ‘noble savage’ image.

This series was included in as part of a major Aotearoa New Zealand survey exhibition entitled Oceania: Imagining the Pacific. The following is an essay I wrote for the exhibition publication which features Semu’s works alongside a number of Semu’s contemporaries, including Lisa Reihana, Yuki Kihara and Edith Amuituanai.