There have been some losses from the ranks of Dunedin's dealer galleries but the survivors and their public counterparts still provide a varied and sometimes impressive range of offerings.
I by no means got around every place on a personal tour last week but found much of interest and some artists who have acquired notable overseas recognition, one at an early age.
Emilie Truscott (b.1985) is showing at Mint with a solo show Surreal Collage. She was born in Auckland into a family of artists and became interested in the theory and practice of Surrealism.
She went to secondary school in Britain, at Binswood Hall, in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire. She studied psychology, philosophy and art, winning awards as the school's best art student in 2004 and 2005.
She took a BA in psychology intending to practise but eventually art captured her. By 2011 she was working as a self-employed artist in Dunedin and that year won the University of Otago's Art Week Curator's award.
While first inspired by Salvador Dali and Frida Kahlo, she has since been attracted by the British artists Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst, represented in the Saatchi Gallery, and New Zealand collage artists including Peter Lewis and Dale Copeland.
In 2012 she was chosen for the Saatchi Online Inspired by Surrealism collection.
Historically, surrealism aimed to draw on the unconscious, dreams and hallucinations to make images which it was felt would carry the kinds of significance with which people like Sigmund Freud, for example, had endowed them.
As a movement it didn't really survive World War 2, but Truscott's stated aims and methods certainly echo the original programme.
She aims to tap into her unconscious, her ''inner child'', working in a ''trance-like state'' with rational thought ''suspended'' until the result emerges.
The imagery of earlier shows has seemed more overtly surrealist while some of what is in Mint is less so.
This doesn't make the works any the less effective and perhaps signals a shift in direction. Some of the collages strongly reminded me of the Briton Richard Hamilton (1922-2011), whose 1956 collage
What is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing? became a defining image of the pop art movement which is fundamentally unlike surrealism. Truscott's Designer Bones an installation featuring a pile of dirt with an apparently brass skull and other skeletal remains, certainly puts one in mind of Damien Hirst (b.1965), another Briton.
But while his work seems to glamourise death, Truscott's uses mortality to point a moral in the manner of a memento mori. Shortly after the exhibition opened, Truscott relocated to Wellington, which is that city's gain and Dunedin's loss.
Another show I found striking, indeed impressive, was Shigeyuki Kihara's Undressing the Pacific at the Hocken. Born in Samoa in 1975 to a Japanese father and a Samoan mother, she has had a stellar career. Having moved to New Zealand aged 16, she had works bought by Te Papa while still a student and was the first New Zealander to have a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2008.
The ''undressing'' of the title refers to challenging European stereotypes of Pacific Islanders and examining ''the body and dress as sites of cultural and gender identity''.
If this sounds deja vu, don't be put off because the works are often dignified and raise questions people find baffling.
They are based in the Samoan institution of fa'afafine, the long-established practice of dressing and rearing some boys as girls. This used to be done by families with too few daughters to perform all the women's tasks. When the selected grew to manhood, if they married, it would be to a woman.
The institution is no longer just formalised cross-dressing but now something the individual chooses for himself - or herself if that's how he identifies - and a number of the males are gay.
It includes people who have acquired some of the physical characteristics of the opposite gender to the one with which they were born, and people who were both male and female at birth.
As Samoa is a fairly Christian society, it seems remarkable the institution has survived and developed this way. The artist is herself fa'afafine, translated as ''in a manner of a woman''. The show consists of her photographs and others', and screenings of her performances.
We see titillating 19th century photographs and absurdly pornographic caricatures published in 1951. There are photos of the artist in unrelenting full Victorian costume contemplating the damage of natural disasters and a triptych of herself posed and produced like a 19th century photograph.
Seated on a chaise, bare-breasted and grass-skirted, she stares us down intently, then again wholly nude, apparently female and finally, still nude but with a penis. The image certainly raises questions and answers some, too, with dignity.
Peter Entwisle is a Dunedin curator, historian and writer.
