THREE MUSEUMS OF THE ART OF THE PACIFIC AND THE FAR EAST – POSTCOLONIAL, MULTICULTURAL AND PROSOCIAL

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.