The Asia and Pacific Museum in Warsaw amasses, preserves, elaborates and presents the cultural relics of Asia and Oceania. Its collections are above all the testimonies of traditional cultures belonging to a history that fades or rapidly changes when faced with a global civilisation. Via such items, the Museum aims to broaden the knowledge of the Polish and European public with a heritage different from our own, as the shared property of the whole of humanity. We begin from the assumption that artistic and aesthetic values constitute especially to the important area of understanding between cultures and people, an area that is the easiest place to meet without aggression but with mutual curiosity and good will. This mission is particularly important in Poland, a country with a relatively homogenous culture and without a great tradition of contact with countries outside of Europe.

The museum would like to provoke some reflection regarding the diversity and similarities between cultures, the relations between local traditions and the contemporary global world as well as the influences of our fascinations and prejudices on our perception of a different, unknown reality. Therefore, an important part of the museum’s activity is to confront the reality of Asia also through the works of the Polish artists who endeavoured to educate a European audience in this regard.

It is also important that the museum’s space welcomes works of contemporary art, created by artists acting in the conditions of modernity, when an apparently unlimited flow of information gives access to the innumerable achievements of every culture and at the same dangerously devaluates and unifies them. We would like to think – and invite our guests to think – about the relations between local, separated, difficult and dangerous worlds and the contemporary world whose open individualisation and free communication have provided humanity both with previously unimaginable possibilities as well as new dangers.

The Asia and Pacific Museum fulfils its mission by expanding its collection, scientific work, exhibitions, publications, educational activities and all kinds of museum events directed both at specialists (in the field of ethnology, cultural anthropology, oriental studies, art history and other social and humanistic studies) as well as the wider public of Warsaw, Poland and the whole world.