Sam Tupou Sold at Auction Prices

b. 1976 -

Tupou was born in Dunedin, New Zealand in 1976, and moved to the Northern Territory in 1982. He has previously been based in Cairns, and now lives and works in Brisbane. As well as practicing as a contemporary visual artist, Tupou also manages Poly Gone Cowboy in Norman Park, a dynamic creative business that works across screen-printing and t-shirt manufacturing.

SITE SEER continues Tupou’s experiments with colour, patterning and form. The exhibition will showcase colourful serigraphs that explore themes of cross-cultural identity, migration, culture clash, decoration and the value of contemporary images. Tupou particularly focuses on elements that unite the Pacific, such as recurring design motifs, traditional patterning and the convergence of cultures.

Instead of creating immediately consumable images, which is one of the tenets of contemporary visual culture (think of mediums such as Facebook and Instagram), Tupou adds an extra layer of interpretation to otherwise familiar objects. He asks us to ‘un-see’, to become unfamiliar with images we would otherwise find familiar. We see these images anew through Tupou’s practice of using shimmering kaleidoscopes of colour and perplexing bitmap grids.

By rendering ubiquitous subjects unintelligible, Tupou allows the viewer to have a more engaging relationship with the image. We do not just quickly brush over them as we scroll our newsfeeds, or glanceup at them on billboards as we drive. Tupou re-invests the image with visual value while critiquing the terms of consumption we internalise so effortlessly.