Wayne Youle: Back In Five

Growing up in Tītahi Bay, Porirua in the 1970s and 80s, artist Wayne Youle (Ngā Puhi, Ngāti Whakaeke, Ngāti Pākehā) saw a kindred spirit in The Karate Kid—the scrappy outsider who, under the calm guidance of Mr Miyagi, learns to channel cheek into discipline, and raw energy into mastery. But what happens when, one day, you look in the mirror and realise you’ve become the sensei? The student becomes the mentor, the mischief becomes method, and the cheeky kid now carries the weight of legacy, expectation, and time.

Back in Five surveys twenty years of Youle’s sculptural practice, charting the passage of time not just as a theme but as a material that shapes, stretches, and reframes meaning. The title itself carries a familiar promise—stepping away for a moment, only to return changed. Across two decades, Youle circles back to recurring motifs and questions, each time with new insight, humour, and bite.

With his trademark playfulness and wit, Youle tackles big ideas—masculinity, fatherhood, colonial legacy, and bicultural identity—while drawing on the humour and irreverence of his younger self. Schoolboy pranks meet sharp cultural critique, as playful surfaces give way to deeper reflections on identity, memory, and belonging.

Working across a broad range of media, Youle asks what it means to navigate multiple worlds: Māori and Pākehā, son and father, genius and dunce. What looks like a joke at first glance often contains a sting—a challenge to the tidy black-and-white narratives of history and identity. Here, Youle is both Karate Kid and Mr Miyagi—still throwing punches, but now from both corners of the ring.

Developed in partnership with The Suter Art Gallery Te Aratoi o Whakatū, Back in Five brings together a major body of work by one of Aotearoa’s most bold and distinctive contemporary artists.

^{Wayne Youle, EASY/PEASY, 2017. Sandbasted stone piles and happy face foam balls.}