Western mappings of the Great Ocean created the legacy of the “nesias”-Polynesia, Melanesia, Micronesia-based purely on racialized perversions and fantasies of European explorers and colonists. 2 After all, just as there are diverse islands, there are multiple Pacifics: competing imaginaries seen from different colonial vantage points. Increasingly, historians and curators from outside the region over-quote Hau’ofa’s landmark manifesto “Our Sea of Islands” with utopian and pan-Oceanian glee, thus making it seem as if decolonization is complete, while wallpapering over the immense differences between island topographies, Islander cultures, and contrasting colonial histories. But I find utility in both “Oceania” and “Pacific,” considering how the latter is a colonial term, a reminder of the embedded and entangled imperial forces that named and mapped this ocean, and that still need to be confronted. I use “Oceania” in conversation with the influential and oft-quoted Tongan thinker Epeli Hauʻofa, who used that word to gesture toward an expanded and decolonized view of the Pacific Islands as the largest region on earth, and who described it as a “sea of islands” interconnected by ocean, rather than disparate and remote landmasses. Instead, I am interested in nudging this conversation beyond the ambiguities of the ocean to the specificities of Oceania, in order to foster more receptivity toward art and artists from this region. 1 It is in this spirit that I write this essay, which is not meant to be a curatorial text narrating a tidy story of which artists to watch from Oceania. As my late friend and mentor Teresia Teaiwa, a scholar of Banaban and I-Kiribati heritage and one of Oceania’s greatest minds, punned in her own writing, it is essential to emphasize the urgency of specific notions-or rather “S/pacific n/oceans”-of Oceanian history and art: the specificities of genealogies, crossings, colonialisms, wars, struggles, and resilience of the people who live throughout the Great Ocean.

Having grown up between the Marshall Islands, the United States, and Japan, I am concerned with a specific ocean-the Pacific-and in it, the specific islands and communities of people, as well as the art in this part of the world. Lisa Reihana, In Pursuit of Venus, 2015–17. Ultra HD video, color, 7.1 sound, 64 min. Image courtesy of the artist and Artprojects, and New Zealand at Venice. With the support of Creative New Zealand and NZ at Venice Patrons and Partners.

Adrift by Lisa Dee