There is a straightforward geographic fact that Queensland’s cultural institutions have been slowly, deliberately working to honour: Brisbane sits closer to Port Moresby than it does to Sydney. The Coral Sea that lies between the Queensland coast and the islands of Melanesia is not a barrier so much as a shared body of water, a surface that has carried people, language, trade, and influence in both directions across millennia. And yet, for most of Australian art history, the gaze of major galleries was trained firmly westward and northward — toward Europe, toward the established canon, toward the credentialing structures of institutions that were themselves thousands of miles away from the realities of the Pacific.

What Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art — known collectively as QAGOMA — has attempted since the early 1990s is a sustained, institutionally serious reorientation of that gaze. It is not a romantic gesture or a piece of marketing strategy. It is a recognition, embedded in acquisitions policy, curatorial philosophy, research infrastructure, and a permanent collection now spanning decades, that Queensland’s nearest neighbours are Pacific peoples, and that the art those peoples make is among the most alive, complex, and demanding work being produced anywhere in the contemporary world.

That recognition has found its most celebrated expression in the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art — the APT series — but it extends well beyond any single program. It sits in the fabric of the collection itself, in dedicated research centres, in staff specialisations, and in a long chain of exhibitions that have brought Pacific voices directly into the galleries of South Bank without mediation or condescension. Understanding that commitment requires understanding both where it came from and why it matters that it came from Queensland specifically.

THE LOGIC OF PROXIMITY.

When qagoma.queensland is understood as the permanent civic address for Queensland’s twin galleries, the geographic argument becomes clearer still. The Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art are not simply Queensland institutions in the administrative sense. They are institutions whose entire programmatic logic over the past thirty-plus years has been shaped by Queensland’s position on the map — by the fact that this state faces the Pacific, and that its nearest international neighbours are not the European metropoles from which Australian art history drew its initial authority.

The general premise that drove the Asia Pacific Triennial’s founding was that perspectives centring the art of Europe or North America were no longer sufficient to evaluate the art of this region — nor its confidence, relevance and vitality. Given the long-held primacy of Western art, this was a bold position. It was also a position that only an institution in Queensland could fully inhabit. A gallery in Melbourne or Sydney, however distinguished, carries the weight of different civic imperatives — the cosmopolitan imperative, the European inheritance, the settled sense of being at the centre of Australian cultural life. Brisbane, by contrast, had always been something of an afterthought in that story, and it turned that peripheral status into an advantage. It faced north. It faced east, across the Pacific. And in doing so, it found a space that no other major Australian institution had thought to claim.

Doug Hall AM arrived in Brisbane in April 1987, and Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s premiership was already on the rocks — the Fitzgerald Inquiry would begin its hearings in July. When Wayne Goss won the election in 1989 he took on the role as Premier and Minister for the Arts. This is the climate in which the Asia Pacific Triennial was developed. The political transition from the Bjelke-Petersen era to the Goss years created an opening for institutional reimagination — a moment when Queensland’s cultural apparatus could ask itself what it was actually for, and what it might become. The gallery was allowed a vast organisational, curatorial and intellectual change. The APT was central to an institutional and geo-cultural realignment, one which shaped the advocacy for building the Gallery of Modern Art.

A WORLD FIRST, BORN FROM GEOGRAPHIC HONESTY.

The first Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art was more than a first for the Gallery; the major exhibition, focused exclusively on the contemporary art of Asia and the Pacific, was also a world first. Presented at the Queensland Art Gallery from 17 September to 5 December 1993, APT1 arrived at a time when contemporary cultural practices of the region were largely unknown to Australian audiences.

The first APT opened with close to 200 works by 76 artists from South-East Asia, East Asia and the South Pacific. The Pacific component of that inaugural presentation required particular care and particular honesty about the limits of institutional reach. The Pacific required a different approach. Despite the wish to make everything happen in person, the vastness of geography and logistics meant that for the first APT, extensive curatorial travel and visits were not possible. That would later change. But in 1993 the relationship with the Pacific was mediated through New Zealand and its well-established networks and deep understanding of cultural contexts. Queensland itself had a close-knit Pacific community. This is a fact too easily overlooked: the gallery was not engaging with an abstracted, distant region. The Pacific was already present in Queensland — in its communities, in its diasporas, in the cultural life of cities like Brisbane and Townsville — and the APT was in part a recognition of that existing presence.

The opening weekend of APT1 included a remarkable performance project, ‘Povi tau vaga (The challenge)’ — created by Michel Tuffery, Patrice Kaikilekofe from Futuna/New Caledonia, a group of Futuna dancers who travelled to Brisbane for the event, a group of dancers from Brisbane’s Samoan community, a group of locally based Indigenous artists, and the Queensland Art Gallery — took APT1 to the streets. The Pacific was not brought into the gallery from a great distance; it was woven through the streets of Brisbane from the very beginning.

The overwhelmingly positive international reaction to APT1 paved the way for future major exhibitions of contemporary Asian and Pacific art. What had been conceived as perhaps three exhibitions became an ongoing, renewable commitment — a series that has now reached eleven iterations and drawn more than four million visitors with an ever-evolving mix of exciting and important contemporary art by more than one thousand artists from the region.

BUILDING A COLLECTION, NOT JUST AN EXHIBITION.

The APT might be understood primarily as a recurring exhibition event, but its deeper significance lies in what it enabled the gallery to acquire and hold permanently. The APT is distinguished by its extensive acquisition program and commissioning focus. The Gallery has built its collections in tandem with the APT series, becoming an international leader in collecting and presenting Asian and Pacific contemporary art.

The Gallery’s collection of contemporary Pacific art is the broadest in Australia. With the establishment of the Asia Pacific Triennial in the early 1990s, the Gallery recognised the importance of actively developing the Pacific collection. This is a distinction worth examining carefully. Breadth in a collection of Pacific contemporary art is not simply a matter of quantity — it is a matter of geographic range, cultural diversity, and genuine depth across the distinct traditions of Melanesia, Polynesia, Micronesia, and Aotearoa New Zealand. These are not a single culture, not a monolithic Pacific, but an extraordinarily diverse set of peoples, languages, aesthetics, and knowledge systems. Building a collection that does justice to that diversity requires not just purchasing power but sustained curatorial relationships, repeated travel, scholarship, and institutional humility about the limits of any outsider’s understanding.

QAGOMA’s contemporary Asian art collection is among the most extensive of its kind in the world, comprising over 1000 works from the late 1960s to the present, which shed light on modern historical developments, current environments of social change and evolving models of artistic production. The contemporary Asian holdings have been shaped by the Asia Pacific Triennial since 1993, reflecting the diversity of art-making contexts in the region and including major new commissioned works.

The collection did not arrive fully formed. It was built through relationships — including the celebrated philanthropic contribution of Michael Sidney Myer, who announced his substantial support for acquisitions from the Triennial at the media preview of APT1, a contribution that enabled the Gallery to launch the Kenneth and Yasuko Myer Collection of Contemporary Asian Art. The Myer Collection became one of the pillars of QAGOMA’s holdings and remains an important strand of how the gallery has been able to document the trajectory of regional contemporary art across three decades.

THE RESEARCH INFRASTRUCTURE BEHIND THE COLLECTION.

A collection without scholarship risks becoming a storehouse. What QAGOMA built alongside its Pacific and Asian holdings was an institutional research infrastructure designed to sustain curatorial expertise over the long term. The gallery is regarded as a world leader in presenting contemporary art from the region, and in 2002 established the Australian Centre of Asia-Pacific Art (ACAPA). The centre’s objectives are to further the research, documentation, publication, acquisition and exhibition of Asian and Pacific art; support residencies, internships and other professional development opportunities for artists, scholars and museum professionals; and establish partnerships and alliances with similar organisations.

ACAPA has ongoing partnerships with Griffith University’s Griffith Asia Institute and the Asian Arts Society of Australia, as well as relationships with numerous museums, galleries and community organisations across the region. These partnerships expand connections to the art of the Asia Pacific region by enabling staff exchange programs, collaborative research, long-term loans projects and more.

The QAGOMA Research Library holds an ever-growing collection of Asian and Pacific art resources, including the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art Exhibition Archive, with extensive material relating to each APT since 1993. The library holds over 50,000 books and exhibition catalogues and close to 250 current journal titles. This is not incidental infrastructure. It is a scholarly resource with genuine depth — a place where researchers across the region can encounter primary materials, correspondence, installation documentation, and the accumulated intellectual labour of three decades of curatorial engagement with Pacific and Asian art.

PACIFIC WOMEN AND THE DEPTH OF A COMMITTED COLLECTION.

One of the most instructive ways to understand the depth of QAGOMA’s Pacific commitment is through the gallery’s sustained focus on Pacific women artists — a focus that has crystallised in the collection and in dedicated exhibition programs over many years.

Since the Asia Pacific Triennial began in 1993, the series has been celebrated for its engagement with Aotearoa New Zealand and the wider Pacific. Through the APT, the Gallery has built a collection of vibrant works by Pacific women artists. A significant number of these have been acquired through generous bequests made by two women: Jennifer Phipps (1944–2014) and Jennifer Taylor (1935–2015).

These bequests established a dedicated acquisition stream — the Oceania Women’s Fund — that has shaped the Pacific collection’s engagement with women’s artistic practice in ways that few institutions anywhere in the world have attempted at comparable depth. The result became visible in ‘sis: Pacific Art 1980–2023’, an exhibition that ran at GOMA in 2023 and 2024. Highlighting artworks in the QAGOMA Collection, ‘sis’ surveyed four decades of art-making from a sisterhood of artists across Oceania, spanning textiles, ceramics, photography, moving image, sculpture, installation and performance, creating an expanded vision of the art of Oceania over the last forty years.

In its second chapter, ‘sis’ drew together works from Aotearoa New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Australia, the Cook Islands and Tahiti, exploring the many ways in which Pacific women continue to respond to the changes these histories have brought. The exhibition was not a survey of a conveniently unified “Pacific art” — it acknowledged complexity, colonial history, cultural specificity, and the particular challenges faced by women artists within traditions that have been subject to missionary interference, colonial erasure, and the ongoing pressures of globalisation. Responding to the lack of respect expressed towards contemporary Melanesian women, Mekeo artist Julia Mage’au Gray’s work focuses on the importance of cultural tattoos or marks, created and worn by women as a symbol of strength and body sovereignty.

APT11 AND THE CONTINUING COMMITMENT.

The most recent iteration of the Asia Pacific Triennial — APT11 — ran at QAGOMA from 30 November 2024 to 27 April 2025, and confirmed both the durability and the ongoing evolution of the gallery’s Pacific engagement. This was a free exhibition across QAGOMA. Seventy artists, collectives and projects from more than 30 countries featured in this eleventh chapter of the flagship QAGOMA exhibition series.

The Pacific dimension of APT11 was expressed with characteristic depth. Fala Kuta e Toa Ko Tavakefai’ana (2024), a large woven mat by ‘Aunofo Havea Funaki and the Lepamahanga Women’s Group, reflects the community’s custodianship of Tonga’s largest freshwater ecosystem. Made from local kuta reeds, it honours ancestral ties, royal lineage, and communal identity through symbols like the tavake (a chiefly bird) and a coat of arms, affirming women’s enduring role in sustaining both cultural and environmental heritage.

These themes continued in Kuza Ni Tege (2024), an immersive audio-visual presentation by Solomon Islands collectives KAWAKI and Dreamcast Theatre, co-developed with the Nature Conservancy. Centring ecological stewardship and women-led collaborative practices, the work examines three vital natural resources — tree bark, coconut trees, and endangered turtles. In both cases, the work is grounded in immediate ecological and cultural realities that are shared with or proximate to Queensland’s own environmental challenges — the Great Barrier Reef, coastal communities, Indigenous land stewardship. The Pacific is not a distant subject in these works; it is a neighbour speaking to recognisable anxieties and practices.

For the first time, APT11 included creators from Saudi Arabia, Timor-Leste and Uzbekistan. First Nations, minority and diaspora cultures held a central place in the exhibition, as did the collective, performative and community-driven modes of artmaking that thrive in the region. That the Triennial continues to expand its geographic reach, including Timor-Leste for the first time, reflects the ongoing openness of the institution to acknowledging parts of its region that had previously gone without sufficient recognition.

APT11 had a very different tone from its predecessors. It was subtle, sensitive and did not rely on spectacular or social-media-friendly hero works by big-name artists. Rather, it returned the APT to a softer, more collegiate sense of discovery. That return to a more careful, relational curatorial mode is in keeping with the original spirit of the series — with the idea, expressed at APT1 itself, that the exhibition should generate conditions for genuine encounter rather than place visitors on the conveyor belt of art-historical consumption.

THE V&A AND THE GLOBAL RECOGNITION OF A LOCAL COMMITMENT.

The significance of QAGOMA’s thirty-year Pacific and Asian collection program has been formally recognised beyond Australia’s borders. As QAGOMA Director Chris Saines announced while presenting the APT11 lineup: “As we work towards presenting an exhibition of key works acquired by QAGOMA through the thirty-year Asia Pacific Triennial series at the V&A Museum, London in early 2026, we have reflected closely on the significant cultural impact of the Triennial regionally and globally.” That a major London institution would seek to present the fruits of a Queensland gallery’s three-decade Pacific engagement is not merely a point of institutional pride. It is a signal that the cultural wager made in Brisbane in 1993 — that contemporary Pacific and Asian art deserved sustained institutional attention, not occasional inclusion — has been vindicated at the level of global recognition.

The success of the APT played a crucial role in the development of QAGOMA’s second site, the Gallery of Modern Art, which opened in 2006 to provide expanded space for presenting the Triennial and housing the growing collection of contemporary Asian and Pacific art. This institutional approach has positioned the APT as more than just a recurring exhibition — it represents an ongoing project of cultural engagement that has significantly influenced how Australian audiences understand their place within the Asia-Pacific region. When GOMA opened with the fifth Triennial in 2006, the expanded physical footprint of the institution was directly connected to the success and ambition of its Pacific and Asian commitments. The architecture followed the collection logic, not the other way around.

A CIVIC ADDRESS FOR A THIRTY-YEAR RECKONING.

There is something fitting about the fact that the onchain civic namespace that anchors QAGOMA’s permanent institutional identity takes the form qagoma.queensland — a declaration that this institution belongs to Queensland, and that Queensland’s character as a state is inseparable from the art it holds, the relationships it has built, and the geographic orientation it has chosen.

That orientation is the Pacific. Not as a romantic notion of island paradise, not as a diplomatic gesture toward closer trade ties, but as a genuine reckoning with the fact of proximity — with the reality that the peoples of Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Fiji, Tonga, Samoa, the Cook Islands, Tahiti, and Aotearoa New Zealand are Queensland’s near neighbours, that their artists are producing work of sustained intellectual and aesthetic force, and that the gallery in Brisbane has spent more than three decades building the institutional capacity to witness and hold that work properly.

For more than three decades, the much-anticipated, home-grown exhibition has showcased an evolving mix of the most exciting and important developments in contemporary art from across Australia, Asia and the Pacific. It has been instrumental to shaping the Gallery and Brisbane’s identity and global prominence. The APT did not simply bring Pacific art to Brisbane. It changed what Brisbane understood itself to be — a city in the Pacific, not merely adjacent to it; an institution with genuine regional commitments, not merely a southern outpost of a European-facing national culture.

That reorientation is ongoing. It requires each iteration of the Triennial to ask difficult questions about representation, reciprocity, and the limits of institutional authority over the cultures it seeks to celebrate. It requires the collection to keep growing in ways that honour specificity rather than flattening it. And it requires the research infrastructure — ACAPA, the Library, the scholarship — to maintain genuine depth rather than decorative breadth. These are not tasks with fixed endpoints. They are the ongoing work of an institution that has chosen to take its geography seriously, and to build its permanent identity around that choice.