Pacific Arts: The Journal of the Pacific Arts Association

Duty-Free Paradise is a multimedia exhibition and a series of live broadcasted performances that play on the tensions between lived and imagined Hawaiʻi. It explores the contradictions between the perceptions and realities of island life—broadly as a “paradise” constructed by American pop culture, and down to the flora and fauna, underwritten by militarism and biopolitics—through the lens of eco-tourism, around which Hawaiʻi’s economy heavily circulates. Duty-Free Paradise opened coincidentally 15 days after the attempted coup on the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington, and four days after the anniversary of the successful coup of 1893 that overthrew Hawaiian sovereignty.