A Tongpop Tale: Memoirs Of A Professional Brown : Telly Tuita

Telly Tuita's vibrant practice has been celebrated for his bold exploration of diasporic identity and neo-Pacific expression. Working across video, photography, painting, sculpture and installation, Telly has coined the term Tongpop to describe the bright visual language used to celebrate his rich relationship with his ancestral home of Tonga.

Telly's new suite of work revisits his archetype of a professional brown. Through his performative practice of photography, Telly connecting these ideas with the lives and imagery of Moana men, ever since the image of the ‘other’ serves to mythologise and mislead from the true persona/likeness of these individuals. 

Telly draws on figures like Mai, a young 19 year old man from Ra’iātea who was the first Moana man to visit England on Captain Cook's second voyage under the patronage of Joseph Banks. Mai was an instant celebrity in the late 1700s London, painted by Joshua Reynolds—immortalised. Forever the youthful graceful brown man. But no trace or voice of Mai remains anywhere for us to truly know who he was.

Culture and self can serve as markers of one’s identity but sometimes they can serve to interfere, even erase the true nature, true thoughts of the professional brown man.