Island portrait

In this photograph and video, artist Yuk King Tan presents two portraits of workers from a state-owned Chinese construction company. The workers were sent to Rarotonga to build the new national courthouse, a building that Tan says looks like ‘a Chinese building dropped into the South Pacific’.

Tan is fascinated by the cultural, economic, and political relationships between countries, and her work can reveal unexpected connections. Here, she highlights the increasingly prominent and wide-ranging role that China plays in the Pacific islands.