The Exhibition That Asks You to Look Again

The first thing you encounter when you walk into Rising Voices at London's V&A is a life-sized fibreglass sculpture of a Māori security guard.

His name, in the work by New Zealand artist Michael Parekōwhai, is Kapa Haka (Whero). He has been watching people walk past him since 2003. He is, as the exhibition's curators put it, a potent reflection on the stereotypes faced by Māori men even today. The work is funny, uncomfortable, and impossible to ignore — which is precisely the point.

It's an arresting way to open an exhibition. And Rising Voices: Contemporary Art from Asia, Australia and the Pacific, now open at the V&A through January 2027, earns that opening.

Thirty Years in the Making

The show draws on more than three decades of the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art — a series established in Brisbane in 1993 by QAGOMA, and still the only major recurring exhibition dedicated to the region's contemporary makers. The region in question is home to 60 per cent of the global population. It is one of the most linguistically and culturally diverse places on earth. And yet its artists have historically been underrepresented in major Western institutions.

Rising Voices is a corrective — not a polite one.

QAGOMA Director Chris Saines CNZM described the Triennial as "a highly collaborative endeavour involving a vast regional network of in-country advisers and co-curators, and an in-house curatorial model driven equally by contemporary art and customary, community-based practice." That philosophy — rigorous, relational, rooted in place — is exactly what makes this exhibition different from a standard international survey.

What's Inside

The exhibition moves through three thematic rooms, each doing something distinct.

Re-Visioning History is the most confrontational. Pala Pothupitiye's Kalutara Fort reimagines the map of a Sri Lankan military camp that passed through Portuguese, Dutch and British colonial hands. Nearby, a 1995 collaborative work by Brenda Fajardo, Elisabet Kauage, Mathias Kauage and John Siune responds to the Bougainville conflict in Papua New Guinea — the largest and deadliest conflict in Oceania since the Second World War. Photography plays a prominent role too, with Naomi Hobson and Michael Cook capturing intimate portraits and stylised scenes of life, both real and imagined.

Enduring Knowledge is quieter but no less rigorous. Shell necklaces by Lola Greeno, crafted from iridescent maireener and abalone. Porcelain busts by Ah Xian, illustrated with cobalt-glaze landscapes in a technique perfected in Jingdezhen during the Ming dynasty. Works on paper by Nusra Latif Qureshi, who subverts the conventions of South Asian miniature painting by centering female subjects. This section is about what gets carried across generations — not in archives, but in hands, materials, and ways of making.

Evolving Faith closes the show with Montien Boonma's Lotus Sound (1992), inspired by the chiming bells and blooming lotus flowers of a temple in Chiang Mai, and Takahiro Iwasaki's three-metre suspended sculpture constructed from Japanese cypress — a mirror of the sacred Phoenix Hall at Japan's Byōdō-in Temple. It's a quietly breathtaking way to end.

Why It Matters

"The works in Rising Voices will resonate with visitors while reflecting the depth, dynamism and cross-cultural engagement of the art produced across this vast region," said Sir Tristram Hunt, Director of the V&A.

That framing is important. Rising Voices isn't positioned as a curiosity or a survey from the margins. It's an argument — that the Asia Pacific has been producing some of the most vital, grounded, and formally inventive art of the past thirty years, and that the world is only now paying proper attention.

Brisbane, for its part, has known this for a while.

Rising Voices: Contemporary Art from Asia, Australia and the Pacific is at the V&A, London, until 10 January 2027. Tickets at vam.ac.uk.