More Than 40 Asia Pacific Artists Are Taking Over London’s V&A

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London’s Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) has today announced a large-scale exhibition in collaboration with Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, bringing together the work of more than 40 artists from 25 countries across the Asia Pacific region.

The show, titled Rising Voices: Contemporary Art from Asia, Australia and the Pacific, will present more than 70 works spanning sculpture, photography, painting, ceramics, weaving and body adornment, many of which have never previously been exhibited outside of the region. 

Daniel Slater, director of exhibitions at the V&A, said in a statement: “Rising Voices brings together an extraordinary group of artists whose works reveal stories that are at once deeply rooted in place and urgently resonant on a global stage. 

“These works have never been seen in the UK before, yet they speak to histories and perspectives that are essential to a fuller understanding of our shared contemporary world. From the enduring strength of ancestral knowledge and faith to powerful reflections on colonial legacies and conflict, the exhibition unfolds narratives that deserve far greater visibility here.”

Opening on 16 May, the exhibition will draw on Brisbane’s long-running Asia Pacific Triennial, launched in 1993. It will bring a curated selection of works from more than 30 years of the survey to London for only the second time outside Australia, following a 2019 presentation in Santiago.

The show will foreground First Nations perspectives, including the work of Bidjara artist Michael Cook, who turns the colonial lens inside out with Majority Rule (Tunnel) (2014). By multiplying an Aboriginal man across 1940s-style urban scenes—decades before Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples were granted citizenship or counted in the census—the photographer makes his Indigenous subject the majority, quietly upending the visual hierarchies long embedded in public space.

Another thread comes from artists whose practices reflect diasporic and cross‑border lives in Australia and beyond, from China‑born Ah Xian to Afghanistan Australian artist Khadim Ali, whose The Arrivals 12 (2017) depicts an upturned boat reminiscent of the 2010 Christmas Island disaster. The work evokes migration and asylum politics that have long shaped Australian policy—and reverberate globally, including across the UK.