Born in Hamilton in 1972, Maori artist Regan Tamanui (aka HA-HA) lives and works in Melbourne, Australia. Entirely self-taught, Tamanui spearheaded the Melbourne stencil movement in 2002. He is now regarded as Australia's most prolific and skilled stencil artist to date and is represented in major national museums, private and corporate collections.

In his first solo exhibition in his home country of New Zealand, Tamanui presents Personal Heroes, a retrospective portrait series of New Zealand's beloved rugby players to coincide with the 2011 Rugby World Cup.

Invoking 19th Century colonial portraits of the 'noble savage', Tamanui's players of Maori, Pacific Island and Pakeha descent are at once signifier of historical colonialist hegemony, and critique of contemporary corporate globalisation.

Personal Heroes reminisces on Rugby Union's history before the truly professional era was ushered into the corporate board-rooms like John the Baptist’s head being presented before King Herod. In this series, Tamanui explores themes of 'the working class man' the 'corporate team vs individual'. These themes perhaps serve as an allegory for contemporary culture and the 21st Century decline of community. However we see them these are rugby heroes, individuals who played for the team, mixed with the team, and tried hard to be one of the team. In essence they played for glory; team, individual, personal, but there was no talk of playing for the corporation, the advertisers, the sponsors, the brand.

The formation of high powered, financially focused, corporate groups whose specific purpose was the offering and selling of TV rights, sponsorships, naming rights, logos and merchandise for everything, (including whole competitions, games, clubs and personal appearances), heralded the beginning of the end of the amateur workingman’s sporting hero. Now everything was to be merchandised, homogenised, packaged, presented, televised, serialised, and advertised. Everything was for sale. There was to be no difference between man and product, one is the other and everything had a barcode, a stamp of approval and ultimately a use by date.

Where once team players worked to support their collective sporting endeavour, their home-side, home-town, or home-country, now corporate money demands they play the corporate game. They are ‘in business’ to make ‘business’, they are wheels in the cogs of corporate machinery, finely tuned, fiercely competitive, financially fixated on the boss’s wishes, celebrity and fame bringing home the brand and the bucks.

Personal Heroes is Tamanui's lament for the passing of the mantel ‘Individual Hero’ over to ‘Corporate Property’.