In Telly Tuita’s typical Tongpop style, these portraits offer a bold, generous, and unapologetically colourful vision of Pacific identity, one where memory, migration, fantasy, and cultural resilience exist together.

These portraits act as preliminary sketches towards a forthcoming performative self-portrait series, building the mood and personality of Tuita’s new invented characters. Borrowing ideas from Jungian theory, pop culture, and Tuita’s own history, he mirrors and questions, the complexity of being a man—of how he performs as a man.

In Archetypes of Man, Tuita pulls from personal, social, cultural, psychological, and political understanding and dilemma of what it is to be a man, archetypes that every boy experiences around them. Through these, Tuita explores the internal processes of the self, the shadow, and the persona that dictate how we present ourselves to the world.

A staple of Tuita’s oeuvre, the bust of these four figures are outlined by Hikule’o, the ancient Tongan goddess whose demise was at the hand of both English and Tongan men. The tetraptych of heraldic shields perform the many dualities of Tuita’s own sense and uncertainty towards being a man. Ribbons fringing the work as a prized trophy feminising the figures stamp Tuita’s comfort with his own anima (feminine side). Latticing and decorating the bust are Tongan kupesi designs, with colour allotted as personifying the different archetypes Tuita is investigating. Cartoonish outlines of these archetypes sit of the shoulders as whispering egos.

The Jester dances as the fag. The Hero strongly stands for the bloke. The Wizard transforms an immigrant. The King now is a celebrity.