Background
The Borneo Cultures Museum in Kuching is the largest museum in Malaysia and the second largest in Southeast Asia. It replaced the visitor offer of the Sarawak State Museum, an institution founded in 1891, and was delivered by the Sarawak Museum Department under the Sarawak Museum Campus Initiative approved in 2014. Development of the five-storey building and its annexe was fully funded by the Sarawak state government at a cost of RM323 million, and the museum opened to the public on 9 March 2022.
Rather than reproduce a conventional artefact-case museum, the state set out to build its galleries around technology-led storytelling. Sarawak Premier Abang Johari Tun Openg has said the decision to break with the usual museum model — and to lean on interactive and AI-supported exhibits — was deliberate, and framed the museum as a stimulus for the state's cultural economy.
The galleries
The exhibition floors are themed and stacked: the children's gallery Love our Rivers on the second floor, In Harmony with Nature on the third, Time Changes on the fourth and Objects of Desire on the fifth. More than a thousand artefacts are presented across them.
- *In Harmony with Nature* is staged as an immersive journey from the riverine coast, through rainforest, to the highlands. Large-scale environments built from cinematic footage and graphic installations are combined with hands-on interactives, including a curved wraparound projection wall of a Bornean rainforest that visitors walk up to and point at.
- *Time Changes* covers 40,000 years of human presence on the island, from the prehistoric remains of Niah's Great Cave to the colonial period and the formation of Malaysia. It includes a built, walk-in recreation of the cave, where a large projected interactive table sits in a darkened rock-formed room.
- *Objects of Desire* presents ceramics, textiles and ornaments in colour-rich settings, with large-format projection used alongside the cases to show craft processes at scale.
Technology
The permanent galleries combine large-format projection, projection mapping onto built surfaces and objects, augmented reality and AI-driven elements with conventional display. Projection is the primary medium: gobo-style lighting patterns the floors of the rainforest gallery, cinematic content is thrown across full-height walls above artefact cases, and the cave environment is lit and animated with projected effects. Interpretation is delivered through hands-on interactive stations and touch tables placed within the environments rather than on separate terminals.
No headsets are used; the immersion is architectural and projected, so groups move through the spaces together.
Design and delivery
The museum ran a global search before appointing Montreal-based GSM Project (now GSM Studios) to redefine the visitor experience. GSM worked with the museum's curators, experts and scholars for four years, holding a master-planning-to-final-design commission covering roughly 6,000 m² of exhibition space, and built the narrative arc linking collections, new media and oral history. Malaysian studio FrameMotion Studio is credited with the museum's projection mapping, AR and AI-driven experiences.
Reception
GSM reports the museum has received over 70,000 visitors a month since opening, from school groups to international tourists. In May 2024 the interactive galleries were the focus of a visit by more than 70 journalists attending the National Journalists' Day (HAWANA) celebration in Kuching, several of whom singled out the Niah Cave experience as unlike anything they had seen in another museum. In late 2025 the museum topped the public voting on the Museum World Ranking site, ahead of the Louvre, which state leaders attributed to its technology-led approach.
