Origins: An Ocean of Islands
The astounding mobility of Oceanic peoples over millennia was a catalyst for the flourishing of a kaleidoscopic range of cultures and languages across some ten thousand islands. In this vast cosmopolitan network, spanning one third of the globe, islands are departure points as well as destinations. Oral histories tell of the jagged ends of islands breaking off and swimming like canoes—or sharks—through the ocean to anchor themselves farther east, creating new homes for the next generation of Islanders. These island communities were never static settlements but heavily trafficked staging posts in an ancient trajectory of ocean passage that reached across space and time. The Ocean itself is a highway, one that links—rather than separates—Islanders who are bound by common ancestry. These connections invigorate Oceanic art, with materials and new ideas born of the dynamic webs of exchange and encounter that are a hallmark of the region.
Like the canoes that carried people on their ocean voyages, the arts of Oceania are vessels that facilitate more metaphysical passages. They effect transitions between realms that can bridge the past with the present. Even the simplest devices are conceptually vast: fishhooks, charts made of sticks, or lengths of knotted fiber cord are practical art forms that have the capacity to unlock an extraordinary archive of cultural knowledge. These galleries explore the visible, tangible expression of these expansive ideas alongside the unique spatial, and relational, dynamics of Oceania. What you see here—horizon lines, the arching dome of the sky, islands tethered in a vast ocean—are the coordinates that guide time and shape life in this unique and compelling landscape.
Generative Power: Oceanic Art and Agency
Papua New Guinea and the large archipelagos situated off its coastline are among the most linguistically and biologically diverse countries in the world. Artists throughout this region produce compelling, often monumental, artworks with formidable visual power. These experts are chiefs and orators, leaders with the capacity to guide, heal, and manage the community’s relationships with learned ancestors. They are renowned for their ability to manipulate locally sourced materials into spiritually transformative artworks. Their spectacular creations in wood, bark, fiber, shell, and bone present a rich archive of Indigenous knowledge and tell a multitude of stories relating to origins, ceremonial life, and ancestral power.
Performed or displayed in dramatic presentations accompanied by song and dance, the visual arts of Oceania aim to engage (and even overwhelm) viewers. Specialists carve and assemble striking items that are understood to have powerful agency. Their fabrication is intended not as a means of representing ancestral spirits but, rather, of manifesting them. The act of weaving, carving, or painting can draw forth these invisible yet lively and often dangerous spirits, rendering them tangible for a time. Far from being mute or passive observers of the living, ancestral spirits are heavily invested in shaping life’s outcomes. Designs in art are informed by a strong sense of efficacy and what is deemed appropriate or culturally sound. Artists focus on drawing out ideal, exemplary forms, balancing their profound knowledge of materials and technology with a keen understanding of the aesthetics that will have the most impact.
Pacific Exploits in the Global Arena
Oceania’s entanglements with Europe began in the sixteenth century with Spanish and Portuguese exploratory incursions into the region. These were followed by the expansionist projects of rival European maritime powers, including the Dutch, French, and British in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Then, from the nineteenth century onward, the region saw colonial exploitation by German, Australian, United States, and Indonesian authorities seeking to establish strategic military bases and exert control over natural resources.
The international expansion of slavery (referred to in the Pacific context as “blackbirding”) led to entire populations of islands being coerced to work as enslaved labor or indentured workers on plantations in Fiji, Samoa, and Australia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The first Pacific Island nations secured independence through movements that began in the 1960s. The violence of colonial intervention continues to be vehemently contested to the present day by Indigenous Pacific peoples who strongly assert sovereignty over their lands, resources, and languages, which are the foundations of enduring cultural knowledge and belief systems.
Generating Vitality in the Asmat World
The name Asmat derives from the term “Asamat-ow” (meaning “Us, people”). It draws a distinction between Asmat (as humans) and the nonhuman, yet sentient, beings (plants, animals, birds, and spirits) with whom the present generation shares the world. Life in the region is closely entwined with death, which is understood not as an end but as one stage in an ongoing cycle of rebirth.
Unlike women who can support life within their own bodies, Asmat men wishing to capture nature’s generative capacities once did so through the act of headhunting. This practice—an important aspect of male ritual prestige before its prohibition in the twentieth century by Dutch colonial authorities—involved pursuing a rival and taking his life. Since the human head contains the most concentrated source of vitality, its capture (and the preservation of the skull in particular) catalyzed future cycles of growth and rebirth for humans, ancestors, and the natural world.
Headhunting iconography in Asmat art continues to resonate with foundational cultural principles that emphasize the regenerative aspects of warfare. If death set into motion natural cycles that paved the way for life’s sustaining forces, art was its conduit: a powerful means to channel nature’s energy and facilitate its exchange and transmission long into the future.
Lake Sentani: Line and Form
Once part of the ocean, the vast Lake Sentani is home to a variety of turtles, crocodiles, sawfish, and shellfish, which are traded north to coastal communities at Humboldt Bay, New Guinea. Characteristics of these creatures populate the rich customary designs that Sentani artists inscribe, paint, or even burn onto wood, bark cloth, and bamboo. Figurative designs include fouw (interlocking spirals) in dense or loosely symmetrical arrangements that transform a surface into a complex web of curvilinear forms. These patterns may be a specific reference to creation stories in which an early ancestor climbed into the heavens on a rope made of clouds, an important spatial counterpoint to other tales that describe the original ancestors emerging from the muddy bed of the lake.
The continuous transition across the borders of earth and sky are alluded to in the spirals’ sense of release and return, a tension that moves in both directions. A distinct range of motifs (termed homo, which translates as “writing”) was a further means of inscription, indicating specific owners as well as their status, familial relationships, and other genealogical affiliations. The insignia relating to clan ancestors were the responsibility of descendant groups who had the right to reproduce them in a kind of copyright system. This ensured that the knowledge associated with each motif was safeguarded as it passed from one generation to the next.
Networks of Exchange in Northwest New Guinea
The regional movements of Oceanic peoples have fostered thousands of related yet distinct customary practices and artistic traditions. Islanders established homelands in places where cultural spheres converged, using fluid borders to create extensive trade relationships with neighboring archipelagos. Northwest New Guinea was one such place of convergence. Its coastal peoples were skilled seafarers who developed pivotal trade networks with Maluku Tenggara in eastern Indonesia and beyond, trading birds-of-paradise and enslaved individuals with the sultans of the spice-rich island of Tidore. Shells, pearls, and turtle shells were exchanged for rarities such as porcelain, glass beads, textiles, and iron.
Maintaining connections with one’s forebears remained paramount to asserting dominance in this vastly complex and competitive maritime network. Oceangoing craft, as well as small, portable sculptures afforded space for these interactions to thrive. In Cenderawasih Bay, carved korwar (ancestor figures) were carried by individuals as charms or amulets, but were also taken on dangerous sea voyages during which their spiritual support and nanek (blessings) were sought as protection. As repositories for ancestral agency, these figures were “vessels” in the broadest sense—a means for a community to summon forth powerful familial spirits, modelled on the canoes that had conveyed them to those shores.
A World on the Horizon: Cosmopolitan Interactions in Maluku Tenggara
Renowned for their seafaring, the people of Maluku Tenggara in eastern Indonesia center the iconography of boats and canoes in their cultural life. The residences of chiefs, ceremonial houses, and, in some cases, entire villages resemble and are organized conceptually as oceangoing vessels. These structures are established in alignment with the sea and coastline, and are even referred to as boats, with seats for the highest-ranking leaders positioned at the “helm.” Ceremonial feasts ensure renewal and seasonal abundance, with the language of the ocean and its navigation prescribing ceremonial life. This language guides ideas concerning appropriate conduct for marriages and births and informs the way people bury their dead.
Northern Maluku is home to the plants that produce cloves, nutmeg, and mace. Indigenous groups exchanged these precious commodities for starchy sago from the islands to the west and for rice from Java. When Austronesian-speaking voyagers arrived to settle the surrounding archipelagos some five thousand years ago, they integrated themselves into this dynamic world of intermingling cultures characterized by the mobility of ideas, people, and goods. These seafarers created their own relationships to advance exchanges that were economic (trade), strategic (warfare), and genealogical (marriage). The art of the region illuminates the expansive range of these intercultural connections and entanglements.
Balancing the Cosmos: Arts of Island Southeast Asia
Ocean navigators steered their vessels across the island straits of Southeast Asia some five thousand years ago, moving from Taiwan and the Philippines into Borneo, Sumatra, and eastern Indonesia before landing in the coral atolls of the northern Pacific. Establishing new settlements within a vast cosmopolitan hub, these groups upheld the spiritual beliefs of their forebearers, venerating ancestors and local deities while simultaneously incorporating stylistic influences from newly introduced religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, and, later, Islam and Christianity.
The arts and architecture of Island Southeast Asia express a duality between the upper celestial world, inhabited by benevolent ancestors, and the watery lower world of reptilian creatures where potentially dangerous deities reside. Humans occupy the earthly domain between these two opposing realms. This cosmological framing is explored through complementary pairings such as male and female, hot and cool, sun and moon. Ritual experts, often skilled artists and weavers, hold these oppositions in balance by harnessing the potent qualities of a diverse array of materials. Through their work, they achieve harmony in the natural and spirit worlds. A sense of order and well-being is expressed in abundant crops, fertile livestock, and generations of healthy children who will continue the ancestral lineage.
Women’s Wealth in the Northern Pacific
Oceanic textiles are strong expressions of genealogy, their fibers and designs inscribing the relationships that weave individuals and generations together. When the navigators of the northern Pacific settled places as far-reaching as the Kaniet Islands to the south, Kiribati in the east, and Palau in the west, they shared knowledge, ideas, and expertise. Women in Pohnpei perfected the art of loom weaving, the result of relationships established by later generations of Islanders who ventured southwest from these remote volcanic islands and interacted with island groups in eastern Indonesia. Valuable textiles still accompany every major ceremonial occasion and are presented at formal gatherings along with scented coconut oils, flower garlands, and specially prepared food.
Women weavers play a vital role in networks of exchange and wealth. In Pohnpei, they weave rich red dohr (banana-fiber belts) imbued with the manaman (sacred power) of the high-ranking men who wear them. On the Marshall Islands, designs woven into ornate jaki-ed (mats)—which are worn wrapped around the waist—are passed down through generations of women in the weaver’s lineage. These motifs are grounded in close observation of the environment, with names that refer to the scuttling tracks of crabs on the sand or the undulating coastlines of the islands.
Ancestral Homelands
Polynesian navigators were among the most accomplished seafarers of the ancient world, traversing vast expanses of ocean in double-hulled canoes. As they sailed east to settle new islands, the idea of an ancestral homeland identified as Havai'i became increasingly important. Local variants of the name—Avaiki (Niue, Cook Islands), Savai'i (Sāmoa), Hawaiki (Aotearoa New Zealand), and Hawai‘i (Hawaiian Islands)—show how shared origins and beliefs took root in new places and across different geographies.
On Tahiti and the islands of central and eastern Polynesia, the sacred sites where people gather are conceived of as canoes that have come to settle on land. Open, flat spaces, like the extensive ritual complex at Taputapuātea on Ra'iātea, Society Islands, provide the ideal conditions for interactions with ancestral gods. These include highly coordinated presentations where groups perform in unison, reinforcing their coming together as a single body and emulating the early voyages to these new territories.
Here, relationships between the worlds of the living and the dead were formerly managed by ritual experts, often the younger siblings of high-ranking chiefs who traced their ancestry to the first gods. Charged with this dangerous duty, specialists commissioned artworks made of rare and valuable materials that served as temporary vessels for spirits and atua (gods) during their dynamic interactions. These carved and woven figures, staffs, and vessels were designed to summon the gods from te pō, the spirit world associated with the night, into te ao, the world of light and life inhabited by humans.
Shimmer and Light: Arts of Solomon Islands
Across Oceania, art is deployed to capture the vital spiritual energy of the life forces that animate the universe. Indigenous assessments of art consider aspects such as polish, shine, and brilliance. Does something glow and resonate with radiance or is it dull and lifeless? The value of things—and people—is determined according to their lustrous qualities.
In Solomon Islands, a large archipelago situated to the east of Papua New Guinea, distinctive aesthetics reflect life on the open sea. Shimmering white shell against dark stained wood mirrors the slippery scales of fish and the silvery quality of sunlight as it reflects off the water’s surface. This sparkling luminosity signals the approving presence of ancestors, providing Islanders with reassuring evidence of social cohesion and unity.
At the center of each Solomon Island village is the canoe house, a repository for the community’s most valuable and prestigious items. Ancestral reliquaries are kept here alongside the oceangoing canoes, ensuring that the wisdom and knowledge of former chiefs and ancestral deities can guide the decision making of the current generation.
Where I come from
my heart is half bark
the other half a quarter cloud
the rest all shark
—John Puhiatau Pule,
poet and artist (b. 1962, Niue)
Elemental Time: Marking Connections to Country
Australia is home to the oldest continuous cultures on earth. For more than sixty thousand years, Indigenous practitioners have created art that captures the sacred geography of Country, a foundational concept connecting individuals to place. Country can refer to a specific tract of land or water that provides a vital anchor point for personal, cultural, and spiritual identity. Dynamic art forms, including permanent rock sites, sacred scarred trees, and ephemeral sand sculptures, are testaments to the rich diversity of landscapes and the networks of ancient knowledge that are embedded within them. These extend from the Saltwater Country of the continent’s sweeping coastlines to its dense tropical rainforests and arid desert interior.
In this gallery, marks—etched into wood, stone, shell, or the human body—are more than mere decoration. In Australia’s north, the shimmering brightness created by the interplay of incised lines on glistening pearl shell or the luminous rarrk (crosshatching) patterns painted on panels of eucalyptus bark signify the spiritual presence of ancestors. Their agency is glimpsed in natural phenomena such as seasonal flooding and the electrical charge of storm clouds and rain. In the southeast, engravings on the surface of shields express the intricate webs of connection that link multiple generations with the forces that bring the environment to life.
Ocean Routes: Interactive Island Networks
In a dynamic world of ocean and islands, life is structured around mobility, and things are made to be portable. The islands to the north and south of New Guinea are linked by complex maritime networks that encourage the exchange of ceremonial gifts and designs. These extensive interactions have forged alliances and cemented relationships, giving rise to unique, yet interconnected, art traditions. The innovative artists of the Tami Islands in the Huon Gulf were among the most prolific and influential carvers in the region, producing large quantities of expertly crafted bowls and headrests. These circulated widely, creating a shared aesthetic that reached far beyond the islands’ immediate boundaries.
Farther south, a cluster of over 270 islands lie within a narrow stretch of water characterized by reefs, powerful currents, and strong tides. Known locally as Zenadth Kes, the region is identified on maps as the Torres Strait (named for the navigator who piloted the first European vessel through its treacherous waters in 1606). Storytelling in the western islands features masked performances that relate the exploits of warrior-heroes, such as Kwoiam who used magic to walk from Cape York on the Australian mainland to southern New Guinea. Ocean trade networks reinforce the close links between these adjacent coastlines. Kina, the pearl-shell currency once used in Papua New Guinea, was harvested in Torres Strait waters, while the Islands’ iconic drums, known as warup, share formal characteristics with flared examples made across the channel in the Papuan Gulf.
Circulation and Exchange in Coastal New Guinea
Islands are defined by thresholds. On the boundary where land meets ocean, there is always interaction. For generations, goods and valuables have circulated along the coastline of New Guinea and the islands off its shores, developing into formal networks of customary exchange. These networks are an important vehicle for enforcing status and prestige and for nurturing vital relationships in a region where connection is everything.
The Massim region of New Guinea is home to the kula cycle, a system of reciprocal exchange in which elaborately decorated oceangoing canoes carry valuable soulava (red-shell necklaces) to islands situated to the north (considered traveling clockwise) and mwali (shell armbands) to the south (counterclockwise). This dynamic cycle ensures that strong—ideally life-long—relations are maintained among karayta’u (partners) on neighboring islands.
Circulation is not limited to people and things. Designs and motifs, as well as ideas, are transformed conceptually by their new contexts. In the villages of the Gulf of Papua, energetic designs are expressions of spiritual power attributed directly to the animating influence of ancestors. Spirit boards (often repurposed from the flat panels used for canoe prows) are displayed alongside agiba (skull hooks) in the large-scale men’s houses where the collective potency and generative power of the group is strategically displayed, underscoring the vigorous spiritual health of the community.
Initiation and Revelation in the Sepik River Region
The ritual arts of Papua New Guinea are an index of hidden and invisible sources of power. Access to the formidable knowledge associated with these sources must be controlled, even restricted, to safeguard the uninitiated who are ill-equipped to manage its authority and force. Secreted within the interiors of ceremonial houses, sacred masks and key ritual items are dramatically revealed to young male initiates in ceremonial presentations as they embark on the arduous transition to adulthood.
The revelation of these artworks to the broader community is accompanied by the recounting of historical and mythical events, galvanizing the waken, powerful beings who deliver guidance, prohibitions, and warnings. Spirits are enticed by the living to approach the physical realm, seduced by offerings and the inviting forms of masks and wood carvings, which are rubbed with ginger roots or betel nut to agitate and animate them. Individuals without appropriate status may observe or listen to the invocations without fully grasping the detailed inner workings of all that is being disclosed. Meaning is layered, complex, and as powerful for what it conceals as for what it reveals to the gathered group.
Ceremonial Houses in the Sepik River Region
The large ceremonial houses of the Sawos, Iatmul, and neighboring peoples in the Sepik River region of Papua New Guinea are the embodiment of founding ancestors. Considered origin sites, the buildings are an appropriate place for the storage and display of ancestral relics, sacred objects used by the current generation to maintain connections with their forebears. The potency of the knowledge associated with ritual items is so great that access to the houses is controlled, even restricted, to safeguard those not equipped to manage the relics’ authority and sheer force.
The monumental size and rich embellishments of the ceremonial house create a dramatic backdrop for the arts of oratory and storytelling. During dramatic, multisensorial events that can last for days or weeks, masked individuals activate the public space in front of the house. Their performances are enhanced by the deep, sonorous tones of ancestral “voices” that emanate from slit gongs and nose flutes that are played within the sacred interior. These elements combine to galvanize the spirit of powerful waken (beings) who appear before an assembled crowd and deliver guidance, prohibitions, and warnings.
Bark, Skin, and Sago: Connection with the Land
Materials speak volumes in Oceania. Across the region, cloth made from bark is produced mainly, but not exclusively, by collectives of women who strip, soak, and pound the inner layers of trees to produce soft, supple textiles. Wrapped around the body or incorporated into headdresses and masks, bark cloth acts like a second “skin,” extending the active connections between people and plants. The materials of art, particularly plant matter, reaffirm how the human body is read in Oceania: as a changing entity, much like the living, constantly renewing landscape. Both must be fed and watered, can support life, and can glow with vitality and spiritual nourishment.
In Kwoma and Kambot villages along the Sepik and Keram Rivers in Papua New Guinea, men cut off the fibrous bases of sago palms to create naturally contoured canvases for painting. The bark-like surfaces are the perfect medium for conveying ancestral clan designs—and deeper, often sacred, layers of meaning—that are shared across multiple generations. Individual panels, displayed on the facade or ceiling of a community’s ceremonial house, combine to create a dazzling matrix of images, stories, and shared histories. This dynamic cosmological map outlines the village and its place in the universe.
The Customary Way: Balance and Reciprocity
I came from the taro and the yam. . . . My father and my mother ate yam, and I am born of the sap of the yam.
—Elder Eugène Néchéro (Emma tribe, Canala, New Caledonia)
Seasonal cycles of planting and harvesting sustain island communities. In the large archipelagoes east and southeast of Papua New Guinea, Islanders assert a close relationship—a kinship—with the plants they cultivate. In New Caledonia, early histories of the Kanak peoples align the arrival of the first humans on the islands’ southernmost shores with the appearance of the first yams. The tubers are still referred to with familial terms, such as “elders.” This vocabulary is also reflected in the agricultural process. Rather than being grown from a seed, yams are propagated via cuttings taken from older tubers; thus, a gardener’s crop is considered the younger sibling of those planted generations earlier.
These ancestral histories are grounded in the protocols that govern ceremonial rites, known collectively as kastom (custom). Kastom encompasses a wealth of practical, as well as ritual, knowledge that is intended to establish balance and reciprocity. It creates a strong foundation to guide the current generation in their dealings with their other-than-human relatives—the taro root, the sago palm, and the yam—affirming the interconnectivity among people, their ancestors, and the land.