It's all in the Hands of time.

Biography

J.C

Jean-Christophe Teriihoania was born on the April 5th

of 1970 in Tahiti. He spends his childhood in an

atmosphere laden with Polynesian art : uncles and cousins draw, sculpt and polish Tiki ( representation of demigods). This context will radically direct him to his career.

At 14 years old, he starts a training, as a sculptor engraver at the Centre des Métiers d'Art de Tahiti.

The everyday's life there is similar to a guild : newcomers help the elders in their work, which includes they can be exploited at will.The wearing out acts as a catalyst, and in the end only remain the most patients and observants students. By the way the biggest part of their wage is blocked on their bank account and their only right concerning their creativity is to release it on a sheet of paper, touching the wood being forbidden to them. J.C spends his spare time reading, to increase his knowledge of a world he still doesn't know, helping him ascend above cultural conflicts and to see only the best in each person. He realizes that only handwriting and arts had been able to retain the civilisation's identity.While reading our History, the accounts of ours alternate periods of prosperity and perdition make him know in a roundabout way what his people had escaped due to its georgaphical distance but also what could threaten him in the modernity. New lesson of experience for the future of the Human kind :sophistication should not move us away from the nature and its hidden sense.

J.C, by self-awareness, knows he shelters the same duality : the mildness of the simple life confronting the pressing need for consuming more to dominate the others. However, he isn't a saint and, like everyone else, he can rush in the excess, so if you see him in a funny situation, after work, don't be surprised and keep in mind he may sin to know its nature in order to exorcize it !

Moving to Bora Bora (from where his family comes) for the holidays duration, to develop his abilities with his uncle Joe Teamu ( well known sculptor who has decorated many hotels), away from the constraining rules of school. J.C feels the importance of passing down the knowledge from generation to generation, and its position in the society. The explanation for having so many people sculpting in this family comes from the fact that in the ancient Polynesia, only one group was entitled to do so : the Tuhuna, priests-intendants which social rank was just below the king.

A few years later, in Tahiti, his work (prizewinner of mother-of-pearl engraving), always performed with exactness in the details, allows him to be promoted as a teacher in engraving. And starts to teach to small groups of students, who, for many of them, are ten years older than him. He is 25 years old.

Paradoxically, this position is more a source of frustration than pride, leading him to spend his nights sculpting for his own passion, this leisure being forbidden to him during the day, where he has to watch others at work. In 1998, two years after, he stops teaching, and he earns recognition and notoriety at this moment, when his colleagues chose him to represent French Polynesia during many cultural events organised inside the Oceanian Triangle( New-Zealand, Hawaï and Easter Island). You could find many

pieces of his work in centers or museums such as Oahu and PCC in Hawai, Cultural Minister of

Rarotonga and the museum Des Iles in Tahiti. Through his trips, his curiosity becomes more intense. He remembers that when he was a child, he use to ask his relatives more explanations concerning the Tiki and their ancestor's story, just to obtain a silence for answer. A silence that can only prove the lack of knowledge, due to the fact his ancestors didn't write. This silence, insoluble, J.C keeps it in mind while he is taking pictures, drawing sites and monuments or even talking with the old men and women he can find on the remote islands.

Those expeditions are very fulfilling, as if he is finding a part of himself each time. One day, while

reproducing on a paperboard an ancient monument, facing a Tiki, he feels a strange vibration that gives him, as he says, » the feeling to be one thousand years old »

This event prevents him from sleeping that night and, when every Cartesian explanation is set aside, he has the revelation of the aim of his life : to gather together as many information as possible related to the Polynesian culture, silent and scattered over the islands, and give it back its original dimension. This quests, he knows it, goes past the lenght of his life, but he is convinced that this pioneer task is his own.Is this surprising to see him in Bora Bora ( First born, according to the legend) when we know this island, named as the pearl of the Pacific, to be located in the very center of the Oceanian Triangle, meeting point of the kings. By settling down there, J.C is half way between the three borders of the cultural space he decided to build up again:from here, he decides which destination requires to be probed and then recreates in his workshop what he has seen and understood. In this way, little by little, in alternating work and expeditions, this cultural volume can pile up again and this time, will not be lost.