V&A Opens First Asia-Pacific Triennial Survey in London
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- Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) opened "Rising Voices" in partnership with Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA), featuring more than 70 works by artists from 25 countries that have never before been exhibited in the UK, spanning three decades of QAGOMA's Asia Pacific Triennial (APT).
- QAGOMA's Asia Pacific Triennial, established in 1993 as the first major exhibition dedicated exclusively to contemporary Asia-Pacific art, has drawn more than 4 million visitors and launched artists including Cai Guo-Qiang and Lee Bul; Rising Voices is the first APT survey to tour anywhere in the world after a single 2019 trip to Santiago.
- Daniel Slater, V&A's director of exhibitions, conceived the show in 2018 while still at Tate after attending APT 9, and co-curated it with QAGOMA's Tarun Nagesh as a four-part progression through introduction, politics, materiality, and spirituality.
- Conservation specialists at QAGOMA spent more than two years preparing fragile works for transit, including Thai artist Montien Boonma's Lotus Sound (a curved wall of stacked terracotta bells) and Japanese sculptor Takahiro Iwasaki's nearly three-metre wooden model of Kyoto's Phoenix Pavilion, suspended from the V&A ceiling.
- Aboriginal artist Judy Watson's painting Memory Bones depicts the broken bones and blood of Mulrunji Doomadgee, who died in Australian police custody in 2004; the source notes 33 First Nations people died in custody in 2025 alone, the highest annual toll since records began in 1980.
- The exhibition's curatorial framing deliberately places postcolonial works inside the V&A's South Kensington entrance opposite the medieval and Renaissance galleries, with Slater noting that visitors who have seen Queen Victoria's sapphire coronet upstairs will now encounter the blue flecks in Tasmanian Aboriginal artist Lola Greeno's shell necklaces.
- Sri Lankan artist Pala Pothupitiye's Kalutara Fort reappropriates colonial maps to trace how a Portuguese garrison passed to the Dutch and then the British, with a Buddhist shrine now standing where the fort once did, while Filipino artist Brenda V Fajardo uses tarot characters to read Filipino history under Spanish and American rule.
Why it matters: By staging the first APT touring survey inside a museum housing the British Crown Jewels, the V&A is making a curatorial argument that Asia-Pacific art belongs at the core of global art history, not its periphery, in Slater's words. For UK audiences, 70-plus UK debuts and the deliberate postcolonial juxtapositions reframe the South Kensington building itself as contested terrain rather than a neutral showcase of empire.
