‘Hawai’i Triennial 2025: Aloha Nō’

Honolulu Museum of Art

Let’s be clear: Aloha Nō is not your resort-brochure Hawai‘i. There are no leis, no lū‘aus, no gentle ukuleles wafting in the background. The Hawai‘i Triennial 2025 shreds that postcard and sets fire to the idea that paradise is apolitical. Curated with sharp clarity and deep cultural conviction, Aloha Nō reclaims the language of welcome — not as a tourist slogan, but as an assertion of place, resistance, and Indigenous futurity.

The title — Aloha Nō — loosely translates to "Love, indeed," or "Aloha, nevertheless." That double edge cuts through the entire show. This isn’t passive love; it’s ancestral, radical, and ferociously self-possessed. The participating artists — a constellation of Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian), Pacific Islander, and diasporic voices — refuse flattening. Each work functions as a rebuttal to the colonial gaze and a love letter to land, lineage, and liberation.

At the Honolulu Museum of Art, the heart of the Triennial, the show unspools like an oratory — fluid, communal, impossible to ignore. A multimedia installation by Maile Andrade greets you like a guardian at the gate: feathers, video loops of the sea, recorded chants, and hand-stitched kapa cloths vibrating with quiet defiance. Nearby, a massive sculptural work by Kalani Lā‘au mimics coral bleached by climate change, interlaced with mirrored text: “YOU DON’T OWN THIS OCEAN.”

Throughout the galleries, sound plays a key role — waves crash, ancestors sing, politicians lie. A standout moment: a performance video by queer Chamoru artist Leimana Pakola, whose body is marked with talanoa (Pacific storytelling tattoos), as they move through devastated sugarcane fields whispering, “We were never silent. You were never listening.”

The work isn’t always loud. Some of it murmurs. A series of photographs by Kanahele Young captures Hawaiian aunties stringing lei in a senior centre — but the titles are legal land plot numbers, referencing stolen ʻāina. The contrast is devastating.

What’s most urgent about Aloha Nō is its refusal to simplify. Hawai‘i is not a monolith, and this Triennial makes space for contradictions — grief and joy, sacred rage and humor, searing critique and ceremonial calm. The museum itself seems to loosen under the pressure of such authenticity. Walls become temporary altars. The air feels heavier, like rain is coming.

You leave not with answers, but with a gnawing awareness: that every vacation fantasy ever sold about these islands rests on a scaffolding of erasure. That aloha, in its true form, is not passive politeness — it is commitment. To the land. To each other. To truth.

Aloha Nō is not here to entertain you.

It’s here to wake you the hell up.