A Black Union Jack is a powerful work which goes to the heart of Ralph Hotere's artistic impetus, breathing the minimalist and modernist force of his revolutionary "black light" into contemporaneous issues of national identity which continue to resonate today

Taking the Union Jack motif and stripping it of all its colour and structural cohesivity, the premise of Hotere's work is ultimately one of colonial deconstruction, which exists in a void of geometric composition and dynamacity

Hotere's works were never created to be comfortable and pleasing in and of themselves, nor were they borne of an aesthetic or formal purism. Rather, as seen by the emblazoned "NZ" logo of the current work, they were bastions of revolution, change - works which were deeply infused with a political significance compelling New Zealanders to engage with our darker side, and laying forth a certain beauty as portended by this darkness The black Union Jack was a motif which Hotere returned to over a number of years, but its pertinence in light of the 1981 Springbok Tour is of particular relevance to this work. That the bolder strokes of this work may be interpreted as a swastika is something that, once recognised by the viewer, feels impossible to shake - a reminder of the fascist social politics comprising apartheid in South Africa, and a not-so-subtle protest on Hotere's part in light of New Zealand's response to this

The work's inscription, Greetings from the Land of the Wrong White Crowd, reads almost as a postcard, inferring the external intention of Hotere's work through which a message was not only being presented to, and for, New Zealand, but to the rest of the world. In this way, the black of A Black Union Jack comprises an infinite abyss and space for the development of cultural self-awareness and collective self-criticism through art