Kehinde Wiley, star of the American art scene, official portrait painter of Barack Obama, and founder of the multidisciplinary artist residency program “Black Rock Sénégal” is back in Paris. For his first Parisian exhibition since the 2016 show at Petit Palais, he will be unveiling a new series of paintings and a video-installation based on his time spent this past year in Tahiti.

Wiley’s new works are focused on Tahiti’s Māhū community, the traditional Polynesian classification of people of a third gender, between male and female.  The Māhū were highly respected within their society until they were banned by Catholic and Protestant missionaries.

Wiley’s portraits of beautiful, transgender Tahitian women reference and confront Paul Gauguin’s celebrated works, which also feature subjects from the transgender community, but are fraught with historical undertones of colonialism and sexual objectification.

Building off of Wiley’s earlier portraits that addressed issues of masculine identity and virility, these new portraits explore issues of identity through the lens of transformation, exploring both artifice and artificiality as a trans-cultural phenomenon.