Public museums first appeared in Western European countries in the late eighteenth century against a background of European colonial expansion and the emergence of democratic societies in Europe. Although these public museums in Europe and their counterparts in North America set important museological precedents that have had a global impact, museums in other countries have had different trajectories due to the specific historical, social, and cultural backgrounds against which those museums emerged. In Asia and the Pacific, museums are engaged with postcolonial critiques and state-building projects (see for examples, Macleod 1998; Kreps 2003; Vickers 2007; Lepawsky 2008; Bhatti 2012; Lu 2014; Mathur and Singh 2015; Erskine- Loftus et al. 2016). The museum, as a locus of production, circulation, and consumption of visual culture, has emerged as a state tool of nationalism and has been adopted as a vehicle of modernization in the postcolonial countries in Asia. Their distinctive local discourses have challenged the validity of treating museums with a universal discourse that is epistemologically and ontologically the same as Western counterparts. In the twenty-first century, Asian museums are urged to establish their own museologies, aligning the efforts of the West in ‘decolonizing’ the Eurocentric museum. Museums across the world have become an academic issue that emphasizes global dialogues, cultural specificity, and the need to focus on particular contexts.