When it came to museums across the region commissioning monumental projects, on October 25, Canberra’s National Gallery of Australia (NGA) unveiled its most expensive to date in the museum’s revamped Sculpture Garden: Lindy Lee’s 13-ton, four-meter-high, AUD 14 million (USD 9.4 million) stainless-steel sculpture Ouroboros (2024), based on the ancient symbol of a serpent swallowing its own tail. After five years of ruling over New Zealand’s capital with an iron fist, artist Ronnie van Hout’s giant hand-face sculpture, Quasi (2016), was removed from the roof of City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi.

For the Ng Teng Fong Roof Garden Gallery, in June, the National Gallery Singapore revealed Māori artist Lisa Reihana’s shimmering sculpture of patterns from Songket and Tāniko weavings, GLISTEN (2024). In Shanghai, UCCA Lab curated the biennial 2024 Jing’an International Sculpture Project with 35 large-scale artworks installed around the central district. In Thailand, the One Bangkok development unveiled two permanent installations: the reflective sculptural wall S-Curve (2024) by Anish Kapoor and the irregular tower of disc shapes, It Is, It Isn’t (2024) by Tony Cragg along the two-kilometer Art Loop pathway.