Three museums of the art of the Pacific and
the Far East are described in the paper: Singapore National
Gallery, Australian Art Gallery of South Wales in Sydney,
and New Zealand’s Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. The
institutions have a lot in common: they are all housed in
Neo-Classical buildings, raised in the colonial times, and
have recently been extended, modernized, as well as
adjusted to fulfill new tasks. Apart from displaying Western
art, each of them focuses on promoting the art of the native
peoples: the Malay, Aborigines, and the Maori. Having
been created already in the colonial period as a branch
of British culture, they have been transformed into open
multicultural institutions which combine the main trends
in international museology: infrastructure modernization,
collection digitizing, putting up big temporary exhibitions,
opening to young people and different social groups,
featuring local phenomena, characteristic of the Pacific
Region. The museums’ political and social functions cannot
be overestimated; their ambition is to become culturally
active institutions on a global scale, as well as tools serving
to establish a new type of regional identity of postcolonial
multicultural character
