Nicolai Michoutouchkine is from a family of Russian emigres based in Paris. He started travelling in 1953, before a brief period of conscription and work in New Caledonia. Michoutouchkine settled in Port Vila in 1961 with Aloi Pilioko, an artist from Futuna. They collected more than 6,000 indigenous art objects from right across the South Pacific which have been exhibited, with their own works, in Noumea, French Polynesia, Papua New Guinea, Australia, Fiji, New Zealand, Japan, Sweden, Russia and Central Europe, Taiwan and Indonesia.