Hibiscus Rosa Sinensis

This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).

The short video Hibiscus rosa sinensis begins with a slow pan through lush greenery and stops on a woman who turns and looks directly at the camera. A voluptuous scarlet hibiscus bloom is wedged in her mouth, and for a brief moment she evokes the quintessential dusky maiden enveloped in tropical foliage. But slowly, and with an unwavering gaze, the woman — Angela Tiatia herself — dispels this vision as she starts to consume the flower, triumphantly wiping her mouth afterwards.

Tiatia’s performance was inspired by a well-known poem by the Mexican writer Enrique González Martínez, ‘Tuércele el cuello al cisne de engañoso plumaje’ (‘Wring the neck of the swan with the false plumage’), first published in 1911. In the poem MartÍnez calls on his fellow writers to ‘wring the neck of the swan’ and reject the modernist impulse in Mexican poetry that valued the European tradition of stylised romanticism.1 In a similar spirit, Tiatia stylishly borrows the iconoclastic gesture of the poem — in her case to ‘devour the hibiscus’ and with it the romantic symbolism that the icon connotes.
In countless images of the ‘dusky maiden’, a hibiscus flower is worn behind her ear — an icon that conflates notions of the female body, sexuality and abundance. The trope has long been used to objectify Pacific women as exotic and suggest by extension that the Pacific is an idyllic paradise, but Tiatia’s powerful gaze and her deliberate performance denies these readings. Moreover, unknown to
the casual viewer, the performance took place on the site of the failed Sheraton Hotel in Rarotonga in the Cook Islands. Once destined to be a tourist paradise, the hotel has been abandoned and is now in a dilapidated, graffiti-ridden state.

Nina Tonga

1 Stephen Tapscott (ed.), Twentieth-century Latin American poetry: A bilingual anthology, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1996, p. 48.