Pax Jakupa

About Pax Jakupa

Pax Jakupa was born near Goroka in the Eastern Highlands of PNG sometime in 1979 or 1980. It says a lot about this exquisitely talented artist, and where he has come from, that his birthday is unrecorded. This is true of most of his people. Pax is a self-taught painter but one with an artistic pedigree. His father, Jakupa Ako, was the first Highlands artist to exhibit outside PNG. He had considerable success, especially in Japan. However at the height of his fame, while Pax was still a teenager, he died suddenly and mysteriously. When Pax decided to follow in his father’s footsteps he was already a young man shouldering a lot of responsibilities. He lives in a village with no running water and his house has no electricity, which means he can only paint during the day. In fact he has lost two houses in the last ten years: one was washed away in a flood during a catastrophic wet season and its replacement was destroyed by a fire. PNG is a country without an art market, an arts bureaucracy or government grants to artists. In fact there is not even any form of social security payments. Therefore, like most PNG citizens, Pax has to grow his own food and work his garden. In 2003 Pax met the Melbourne artist Tony Sowersby, when he visited Goroka. Together they painted a mural at the Goroka International School. Later that year he visited Australia for the first time. Pax had won a Commonwealth Award to paint in Fiji and the only way from PNG to Fiji is via Australia! He met with curators at the NGV who recommended him to Beverley Knight at Alcaston Gallery. He returned the following year to become the first non-Australian to show at one of this city’s most prestigious Indigenous Art Galleries. He returned for another show in 2008 but while he was in Melbourne he received the tragic news that his sister had been killed by a falling tree in her garden while saving her young daughter. He was already providing for a nephew, the son of another sister who died in the 90s, and had recently had a daughter of his own. Pax put his art career on the backburner for a while, although he was always painting. When he broke his right hand playing rugby league he produced several works with his left hand until the cast was removed. Sowersby says he has never met a harder working or committed artist. Pax’s work is imbued with a love of his culture. It is based in the traditions and customs of his people. This is not nostalgia but a reflection of a way of life that whilst changing still exists. Pax Jakupa is a man and artist straddling two worlds and like his father paving the way for others of his fellow countrymen and women. In 2012 Pax had his first solo show with Without Pier at the Hampton gallery. In 2013 he was invited to address the Pacific Arts Conference at the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver and his work was exhibited there. Subsequently the MOA purchased two of his pieces and the Bishop Museum in Hawaii and the National Museum of Scotland acquired one each.