This recast cultural geography suffuses form and content, from SANAA’s Japanese-inflected reading of Sydney’s landscape as a set of stepping platforms, to the curatorial decisions shaping the opening commissions. Major inaugural works include Korean artist Kimsooja’s participatory Archive of Mind; Maori artist Lisa Reihana’s videowork Groundloop; Taiwanese-American artist Lee Mingwei’s spatial insertion Spirit House; and Argentinian-Peruvian artist Adrián Villar Rojas’s astonishing monumental installation The End of Imagination, installed in the Stygian depths of the Tank.

The Sydney Opera House remains the acme of the architectural icon. Sydney Modern is its inverse: an anti-icon, loose and plural, with landscape as its guiding principle. Critics, fear not: here the art is the heart.