The V&A (Victoria and Albert Museum) installed a fibreglass bouncer in its main entrance hall this spring. A Māori security guard sculpture, life-sized, standing opposite the medieval European galleries. The Guardian called it a sign that Asia-Pacific art had finally “conquered Britain.” I read that and thought: conquered what, exactly? A room that was built to amplify one kind of authority and absorb everything else?
I know that room. Not the V&A specifically — I have never been — but the acoustic signature of nineteenth-century museum architecture. High ceilings. Hard surfaces. Galleries designed so that footsteps carry. So that voices echo just enough to remind you you are being overheard. The room disciplines the body through sound before a guard says a word. You modulate your voice without thinking about it. You walk more carefully. The space has already told you what kind of person belongs there.
When curators talk about making space for work that was excluded, they mean wall space. They mean which objects get into the building. I move through museums by ear — tracking the shift from marble to wood flooring, reading the height of a ceiling in how my cane tap returns to me. The rooms tell me their boundaries before I reach them.
I went to the Tate Modern, a major contemporary art museum in London, in November 2021 with a friend who uses a wheelchair. We were there for a Yayoi Kusama retrospective — the Japanese artist known for immersive mirrored infinity rooms and polka-dot pumpkins. The gallery published an accessibility guide in advance. It listed which rooms had level access and which infinity rooms could accommodate a wheelchair. What it did not mention: the Kusama rooms are acoustically sealed. You step inside and the sound cuts off. The world outside disappears. For my friend, that was disorienting but manageable. For me, it was destabilising in a way I did not expect. I lost the room. I could not hear the walls. I had no spatial reference except my own breathing. The silence pressed against my ears like water. When we came out, my friend said: that was incredible. I said: I need to sit down for a minute.
But then — the relief when sound returned. The gallery floor singing back my location. The walls placing themselves exactly where I expected them. That particular pleasure of acoustic space snapping into focus.
The access guide told us which doors were wide enough. It did not tell us the rooms were designed to erase orientation.
In February 2024, Kyoto. A converted machiya — traditional wooden townhouse. Haruki Tanaka claps once near the entrance. The sound: sharp, contained, absorbed quickly by the wood and paper. He claps again halfway down the corridor: longer decay, the sound folding back on itself. At the far end, near the garden: open, the sound continuing outside into the trees. This is how you know where you are in a machiya, he says. The room tells you.
Western museums do the opposite. They remove how differently sound behaves in different parts of the space. They want the room to be neutral — which means they want the room to sound like authority. Like stone. Like permanence. Like Europe. Museum professionals would say these acoustics serve preservation needs, controlling humidity and temperature through materials that happen to create reverb. They would say the sound carries to help guards monitor multiple galleries. They would say the echo creates contemplative space. What I hear: rooms that make my body feel like an interruption.
When the V&A puts a Māori sculpture in the entrance hall, it does not change what the hall does to sound. The sculpture stands in a space designed to make everything that is not European feel like an interruption.
Tanaka told me something else that week. In Japan, there is a concept called ma — a Japanese word meaning the interval, the space between sounds. Not silence. The resonance that continues after the sound stops. Western acoustics treats this as dead space. Something to eliminate or fill. But in traditional Japanese performance — noh theatre, shakuhachi flute — ma is structural. It is not the absence of sound. It is the sound hearing itself.
I thought about that when I read the Guardian piece. The article asked: why did it take Britain so long to recognise Asia-Pacific art? But the question assumes the problem is recognition. That the work was always legible, and institutions just needed to look harder. That is not what happened. The work was illegible because the rooms were designed for one kind of body, one kind of seeing, one kind of hearing. The institutions did not fail to see the work. The institutions built rooms that made certain work invisible — and inaudible — by design.
The question is not why it took so long. The question is: what does the room do to the work now that it is inside?
The fibreglass bouncer stands in a space that absorbs nothing.
This article was prompted by ‘I couldn’t believe we weren’t falling over ourselves for it’: Asia-Pacific art finally conquers Britain from Guardian Art & Design.