Alexander Lee

Installation, Te Arata a Noa (The Arch), 2026

Culled from an accumulation of works from the past five years, my presentation at Conductor, Te Arata a Noa (The Arch), is a work about resilience and the Polynesian notion of rā’au.

Rā’au is Tahitian for both wood and medicine/healing in reference to the traditional views of plant-based pharmacopoeia.

Wood becomes a leitmotif in its different forms: paper, textiles, canvas, Chinese ink (burnt plants) and wood itself, which I composed into objects that act as memory helpers, to address and juxtapose wood and its representation into a wild meeting of strange plant-works.

The installation comprises a series of burnt sculptures of Polynesian deities for which I recreated dress and adornment. They stand on a raft looking structure that acts as pedestal and altar.

In the background, a series of drawings and prints on paper depict what looks like colorfield abstractions but slowly reveal themselves and the nuclear history they depict (France conducted 193 nuclear blasts in the area between 1966 and 1996).

On one wall, a large fabric was printed with a woodblock pattern based on a tattoo design of a veri (centipede), a double nod to Brancusi and church banners.

The Veri, a centipede motif that is both venomous and used as a medicinal ingredient in Chinese infusion. The shapes, curved, hollow and stretched; at once female and male, play on the poly-sexual trans-formed genres I am interested in writing into the XXI century. The objects are at once infinity columns, beaded sex-plugs, burnt and christened pagan idols, up-cycled materials, and objects of consumption and ritualized devotion. In our 2026 continued-Covid moment of infectious fear, these work recall first contact that led to the indigenous decimation by pests and cholera and the mournful ills of industrialization that brings us to this moment.

Across the way, a large canvas made with the leaves of the breadfruit tree, a superfood very common in Polynesia.

I invoke the mana (energy and spirit of the animate and inanimate) into these works, at once to’o (ritual object), memory helpers, narrative devices and descendants; into an incantation: can we plant our own medicine?

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