The Box: Journey's with Mai

This exhibition runs until the 14th June 2026

Sir Joshua Reynolds is one of the greats of British painting and will be a name familiar to many.  I had no idea he was born in Plympton, just outside Plymouth though.  He is a major 18th century European painter and the leading portrait artist of the time.  He was one of the founders of the Royal Academy of Art and its first president.

Portrait of Omai is considered his best work and a timeless masterpiece that is one of the best pieces of British art.  In 2022 the portrait was up for sale and in danger of leaving the UK with a hefty expected value of £50 million.  It was place under a 12 month exportation bar.  The National Portrait Gallery started a fund to raise money to buy the portrait and the Getty Museum asked to jointly purchase the painting so that it could be shared between both.  In March 2023, the exportation bar expired with only half of the required amount raised and it was announced that procurement would be joint between the National Portrait Gallery and The Getty Museum.  In April the sale was finalised.

The portrait was initially on display in the National Portrait Gallery as the centrepiece of it's reopening in 2023.  It then went on tour, with three venues across the UK being chosen, Bradford, Cambridge and Plymouth.  This is a farewell tour for the painting as it's next stop is to be the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.  It is great that the Box in Plymouth was chosen as the last stop, especially as there is a pleasing historical resonance.

Mai was from Raiatea, an island in Polynesia and he met Samuel Wallis there in 1767 and Captain Cook in 1769.  In 1773 he joined Captain Tobias Furneaux onboard the HMS Adventure before arriving in London in 1774.  He stayed in Great Britain for two years before joining Captain Cook's third voyage in 1776.  He was the first Polynesian to visit Great Britain and only the second to have visited Europe.  During his stay in Great Britain he became a favourite of society, known for his charm, wit and good looks.

The exhibition begins with large boards on the galleried landing of the staircase showing the different exploratory voyages of the time.  The first room talks a little about Mai and how we have no records of his viewpoint on any of his story, we only have accounts from British people, with their bias.  The displays talk about how Mai was presented in these accounts and also give some of the social context of the time.  Mai visited Plymouth in 1775 and 1776 and this room also explores Plymouth of the time and records of these visits.

The second room includes the stunning portrait of Omai and it is lovely to see it in person.  I think photographs are amazing but they lose a little something.  The portrait is huge and this was a real surprise as I had no idea just how big it was.  He was indeed a good looking young man.  I would have assumed he had been styled in a European fashion, but research suggests this was traditional clothing.  The background is a stylised view of his homelands.

The items in this room is a mix and it includes paintings of people he would have met and known in Great Britain, paintings from the voyages to Polynesia and items from Polynesia.  It was incredible to see plants gathered on the voyages and historical records.  I also loved the pictures by Tupaia, who was a high priest and navigator who sailed with Cook.

It is clear that no matter what European colonisers thought, they encountered a society that while different, was still sophisticated.  Tupaia had trouble communicating his knowledge of navigation because it was not based on the same instruments and measurements.  In an effort to communicate, he produced a map of the islands from memory.  While the British he sailed with believed his knowledge limited, others he met on the voyage welcomed him as an expert.  He was not popular onboard because he demanded homage from those who felt they owed no such respect.  This map has been reinterpreted and it is now understood that Tupaia's knowledge was indeed sophisticated.  It was amazing to see it...  I loved Tupaia's art too, it is good to actually see something from a local perspective and it is clear he was amused by the people he voyaged with.

Mai's life too, is not so simple as might be assumed.  Mai was an attendant to the king and son of a Raiatea landowner.  Following his father's death at the hand of Puni's Bora Boran warriors, he fled to Tahiti.  The Dolphin reached Tahiti in 1767 under Samuel Wallis and a canoe approached the Dolphin and it's occupants threw stones at the British.  The British used artillery to cut the canoe in half and most of its occupants died.  The British then went ashore and cut over 80 canoes in half to disable them.

Eventually friendly relations were developed and a large part of this was the discovery that local women were willing to have sex in exchange for iron nails.  Loss of nails threatened the integrity of the Dolphin.

Mai was injured at some point by the British during the Dolphin's time Tahiti.

Following this, Mai apprenticed to a priest before returning to Raiatea.  He was captured and narrowly escaped death before escaping back to Tahiti.

When Mai came to Britain, he was actually hoping to enlist British support in returning Raiatea to his people.  As someone who aspired to nobility and the priesthood, Mai was not an unsophisticated primitive and was able to charm those he met in Britain.  

Many of the accounts and paintings of Polynesia give the impression of primitive peoples living in paradise.  I think much of the history of the islands is glossed over, maybe because colonisation is controversial and the accounts are biased and difficult.  It's clear that colonisers did not have enough respect or understanding of those they met and no comprehension, at least initially, of the damage they did.  In 1773 Cook wrote "we debauch their morals, already too prone to vice and we introduce amongst them wants and perhaps diseases that they never before knew and which only serves to disturb their happy tranquillity they and their forefathers had enjoyed."

As part of Journeys with Mai, several artists were invited to produce pieces inspired by Mai and the background of his story.  

Lisa Reihana's, In Pursuit of Venus (infected) was an impressive piece that I was able to watch in full.  It is given a room to itself and has a very long, slightly curved screen.  The subject of film slowly, and continuously rotates so the film has no apparent end or beginning.  Not all of the groups of figures are active while they are on screen, although all are active for some portion of their journey across the screen.

In 1804 a wallpaper called Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique was produced with showed an idealised view of Polynesia and the people there, based on accounts from the voyages.  This wallpaper is problematic in that it merges many different tribes in to the landscape of Tahiti and portrays them as happy, noble savages.  The images are sanitised with little sign of tattooing or piercing.  

This wallpaper supplies the inspiration for the background of the film and it is perfect and a little cartoonish.  The figures are based on reality, rather than the sanitised versions portrayed at the time and they are much more realistic.  The part I began with was mostly images of Polynesians living their lives with things being mostly peaceful.  As the film progressed, the influence and presence of the colonisers increased.  The interactions became increasingly difficult with torture, violence and sexual interactions.

It is obviously really important to rewrite this history and attempt to remove the bias of colonization.  Our views continue to be shaped by these accounts because many of us will never travel their ourselves.  Even now on Wikipedia, there are gaps.  The history often jumps from ancient times to modern times, missing out colonization.  I think it is hard to talk about honestly.  The colonizers were just as savage and primitive as the peoples they visited in my view.  They didn't protect those they visited and held them to western, Christian views while corrupting them with western vices.  

It's clear from the material shared about Mai that life in the islands was not unsophisticated but there were disputes between different groups and violence.  There was a lot more going on that noble savages.  I don't think trading nails for sex makes British colonizers more sophisticated.  This is a very difficult perspective for me, as a woman.  How could I possibly be on the side of the colonizers who exploited the people they met, especially the women.

There were two further films but I was unable to watch either in full, as I just didn't have time before the museum closed.  Expedition into a Volcano by Mohini Chandra looks at how our concept of paradise in terms of landscape has been shaped by colonization.  An educational film called Expedition into a Volcano (1962) was found in the Box's archive and used as the inspiration for the film.  The film was projected on to a series of white clothes that hung, in several rows, so you could walk between them and look at the film from a number of different perspectives.

The second film, shown in the Media Lab, was Anak Where did we Stay? by Sadia Pineda.  It considers a more modern emigration from the Philipines to the UK through family stories and footage, alongside imagery from the Box's archives.  What I saw of the film was interesting, watching her mother adjust to living here as a nurse.

I actually feel I really didn't devote enough time or energy to visiting this exhibtion.  I would happily visit it again and start from the beginning.  I had also visited KARST and the MIRROR as well as the extremely busy Beryl Cook exhibition.  I would also like to spend some time looking, and listening, to the material on Bloomberg Arts about the exhibition.  I feel that my recount of the exhibition is a bit scattered and full of holes!  If I do manage to revisit it, I will likely rewrite this blog post in some way.

I thought the exhibition fit incredibly well in to the wider context of exhibitions at the Box, especially the Port of Plymouth and 100 Journeys.  It's clear why Plymouth was chosen to host this exhibition with Sir Joshua Reynolds connections, Mai having visited and Mai having set sail from Plymouth to return to his homelands.  Its also particularly poignant as this is the portrait of Mai's final stop before leaving for the new world, for a time anyway.