In a sunny spot of Foster Botanical Garden in downtown Honolulu, an amorphous structure of bamboo, cut-up plastic water bottles and old surfboards rises from the ground. In a rustic kind of way, it looks like a spaceship, the surfboards acting like shields. Or its long feathery tail suggests an underwater craft of some sort, a mechanical blowfish perhaps, with surfboard-shaped scales.

“A lot of my work tends to look alien, sci-fi,” said artist Leeroy New. “It’s from my influences as a kid growing up in the Philippines, where there was no access to art, no internet.”

New is one of dozens of artists and artist collectives from Australasia, the Americas and Oceania whose work will be on display during Hawai‘i Triennial 2022. The triennial’s title is “Pacific Century — E Ho‘omau no Moananuiakea.”

The 11-week arts extravaganza, which opens this week at seven venues around town, will host art installations, panel discussions, professional development seminars and social gatherings designed to promote and develop the arts. The festival is the latest iteration of what began in 2017 as Honolulu Biennial, was repeated in 2019, and has since been renamed to reflect its staging every third year.

New, 36, has created installations around the world, but his work is a direct outgrowth of his upbringing in a small fishing village with no museums or art galleries. Feeling that he had artistic tendencies, he drew inspiration from comic books, sci-fi movies and stories by his grandmother. “I wanted to partipate in creating these images in real life, physically,” he said. “So a lot of my works are kind of an extension of a kind of personal narrative, a personal mythology that I’m externalizing.”

His creation, named “Kabibe (Conch),” is made wholly from found materials collected in Hawaii with the help of volunteers. The Hub Coworking Hawaii gathered the plastic bottles, and the bamboo was collected on the North Shore, then cut and prepared by volunteers. The nonprofit organization Na Kama Kai on Oahu’s West Side donated most of the surfboards.

“I was so excited when they suggested I use surfboards,” New said.

The use of local materials is in keeping with the triennial organizers’ desire to have the festival reflect a sense of place, not only of the Pacific region in general, but specifically Hawaii, curators of the show said. “It starts with the exhibition title, which for the first time is in English and Hawaiian, and it goes through to the catalogue, where there are many parts of the catalogue that are bilingual,” said head curator Melissa Chiu, director of Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.

Chiu said it was important to have the triennial be held not only in traditional arts venues like Honolulu’s three main museums, but also in somewhat unconventional sites like Foster Botanical Garden and Iolani Palace. Hawaii Theatre Center and the Royal Hawaiian Center will also host Triennial events. “That was about the idea of making contemporary art as accessible as possible,” she said.

Including Hawaiian in the name of the festival — the 2017 festival was themed “Middle of Now/Here” and 2019 festival was “To Make Wrong/Right/Now” — was particularly significant to Drew Kahu‘aina Broderick, a co-curator for the festival.

“It reflects the moment we’re living through — desires for indigeneity are on the rise — and marks another step in the right direction for the organization, one guided by Indigenous world views and committed to a more rooted future here in Hawaii,” said Broderick, currently the director of Koa Gallery at Kapiolani Community College.

Broderick contributed as an artist to the previous festivals. He said he’s seen a lot of changes over the years, “some good and some bad,” but was pleased about the shift to a triennial format, which allowed organizers to form closer working relationships with artists and festival sponsors. He said he is particularly grateful for the funding that was made available to artists this year.

“A lot of the artists here in Hawaii, especially some of them working here 40 or 50 years, are being funded in a way that they haven’t been before,” he said. “And so they’re able to present projects at a different scale, to a different standard that they’ve always wanted to, but always haven’t been able to because of lack of support.”

The third curator of the Hawai‘i Triennial, Miwako Tezuka, associate director of Reversible Destiny Foundation, a progressive artist foundation in New York, pointed to the broader significance of the Pacific region at the present time. The aim of the festival is “to look at the past as well as the future,” she said. “The 20th century was the American Century, where the economic and cultural power center was the American region, but as we move forward, the 21st century is increasingly seeing the significance both in terms of economy and culture in the regions around the Pacific area.”

Chiu, who was born and raised on the north coast of Australia, was intrigued by the theme of Pacific Century. She has curated major exhibitions for the Asia Society in New York, and after spending many years working to promote Asian art on the East Coast, she found herself wondering “what it would be like where advocacy was no longer needed,” she said. “If the idea is that the 21st century is indeed the Pacific century, what would it look like?”

With 43 artists and artist collectives participating in the Hawai‘i Triennial, it was difficult to get curators to name their favorite installations, but they offered a few.

CHIU

The head curator recommended visiting Iolani Palace, seeing it as the place “where the exhibition begins.” She was excited about Jennifer Steinkamp’s video projections of Queen Lili‘uokalani’s garden onto the palace. “She’s best known for botanical, flowery projections that she creates through computer-generated imagery, so the flowers can move in the wind and it looks very active,” Chiu said.

Richard Bell is an artist from Australia who will present a work based on the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, a permanent protest site set up in 1972 in Canberra to raise awareness about land rights for Indigenous people. “In Honolulu, it really is an architectural structure and embassy for conversations on places that are important to Hawaiians,” Chiu said. “Panel discussions and talks, things like that.” There will be two “Embassy Conversation” events held there: 9 to 10:30 a.m. Friday with Joy Enomoto, Kaili Chun and Bernice Akamine; and 9 to 10:30 a.m. Saturday with Noelle M.K.Y. Kahanu, Erin Kahunawaika‘ala Wright and Meleanna Meyer. Both will include a public discussion and are free with a reservation.

She also recommended Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio’s “captivating” new poem “When I Think of Ea,” which will be presented in an audio recording on Friday as part of opening night ceremonies at the palace.

BRODERICK

Video documentarians Joan Lander and the late Puhipau, a collective known as Na Maka o ka ‘Aina (The Eyes of the Land), interested Broderick with their films about the Hawaiian Renaissance, 16 of which will be screened at the Hawaii State Art Museum. “They’re really just telling the stories of this place,” Broderick said. “They’re documentarians, but really interested in the aina, the struggles for independent land rights and water rights. Sometimes it’s very raw portrayals of the realities that we all face here.” Broderick said to his knowledge, it’s the first time HiSAM will present video, which is “kind of a crazy thing to think about, that we’re in 2022 and new media is finally finding its way into our state art museum.”

He also recommended a collaborative work by Ed Greevy and the late Haunani-Kay Trask at the Honolulu Museum of Art,which documents land struggles in Hawaii. “What I find so meaningful about Ed and Haunani’s creative alliance is that they both understood the value of what they were doing, and were able to bring it together to tell about their movements and communities in very different directions,” Broderick said. “Instead of holding grudges against one another because of their identity or their upbringing or their politics, it was really about how they could tell the story of native rights in Hawaii.”

TEZUKA

Photographer Ai Iwane from Japan has been researching the migration of Japanese people to Hawaii and discovered a bon dance song that originated from the disaster-stricken region of Fukushima was brought to Hawaii by migrant farmworkers in the early 20th century. The song is still performed at Hawaii bon dances, whereas the people from Fukushima are dispersed and have not been able to revive it. “It’s kind of an interesting fate that the tradition has survived here, and not just (among) Japanese migrants, but everyone in Hawaii enjoys it,” Tezuka said. Iwane’s photographs will be on display at the Honolulu Museum of Art.

Tezuka also liked Singapore-based performance artist Ming Wong’s video of his unique rendition of “Bali Hai,” the signature song from the musical “South Pacific.” Wong re-enacts the character of Bloody Mary, digitally inserting himself and flashes of amateur productions of the musical into the 1958 film. The work raises questions of racial identity and suggests the notion of an “island” of inclusiveness. Although the character is described as being from the Tonkin region of Vietnam, Bloody Mary has been portrayed by actors of many different ethnicities — Juanita Hall, who originated the character on Broadway, was African American. Tezuka said a new song has been composed for the project, which would be sung by Bloody Mary’s daughter, “but it could be Bloody Mary singing it, looking back on her own life.” Triennial organizers hope that Hawaii’s Loretta Ables Sayre, famed for her portrayal of Bloody Mary in a 2008 Broadway revival, will contribute to the project. The video will be on display at the Hawaii Theatre.

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Hawai‘i Triennial 2022

“Pacific Century — E Ho‘omau no Moananuiakea”

Beginning Friday through May 8

Venues:

>> Bishop Museum

>> Hawaii State Art Museum

>> Honolulu Museum of Art

>> Foster Botanical Garden

>> Hawaii Theatre Center

>> Iolani Palace

>> Royal Hawaiian Center

Opening days

>> Friday: Iolani Palace

>> Saturday: Hawai‘i State Art Museum, Bishop Museum

>> Feb. 20: Honolulu Museum of Art, Foster Botanical Garden, Royal Hawaiian Center

>> Cost: An all-access pass is available for $75, $25 for students, at hawaiicontemporary.org/plan-your-visit. It provides unlimited access to Bishop Museum, Honolulu Museum of Art and Foster Botanical Garden, and includes an audio tour of Iolani Palace, during the duration of the festival. Otherwise, paid admission will be required at those venues. The other sites are free.

>> Info: For a full schedule, visit hawaiicontemporary.org.