Why everyone's talking about this new art gallery in Sydney

Sydney's biggest cultural attraction since the the Opera House has just opened. Here are 10 ways to experience the spectacular Sydney Modern.

Rarely have two adjacent buildings so perfectly embodied colonial and contemporary Sydney. With its mighty sandstone columns and towering neoclassical facade, the Art Gallery of NSW has been an imposing presence in Sydney's Domain for more than a century. By contrast, its new extension and neighbour, Sydney Modern (opening today!), is a symphony of glass walls and soaring atriums that cascades gently down the sandstone escarpment.

Designed by Pritzker Architecture Prize-winning Japanese firm SANAA, the new building is the centrepiece of a $344 million project to create a sprawling campus with outdoor spaces and a public art garden. Access to the Sydney Modern - technically known as the North Building - is via a glass-roofed plaza that's dotted with three giant bronze mythological figures created by acclaimed New Zealand artist Francis Upritchard. It's one of nine site-specific commissions for the expanded gallery, which have been installed in both the old and new buildings.

With its polished concrete floors, airy limestone-clad exhibition spaces and soaring ceilings, the interior of the new building feels a bit like a futuristic airport terminal (albeit one you actually want to hang out in). Descending for four floors from its cavernous light-flooded lobby, the gallery showcases Sydney's natural beauty, thanks to several outdoor terraces with sweeping harbour views, as well as the region's creative prowess.

In short, the project has delivered Sydney's most significant new cultural precinct since the Sydney Opera House. Here are 10 unmissable highlights.

Undoubtedly, Sydney Modern's most dramatic gallery space is the Tank, an underground World War II oil reservoir, which has been re-imagined as an atmospheric seven-metre-high exhibition hall. The space's debut installation is The End of Imagination, Argentine-Peruvian artist Adrian Villar Rojas's collection of large-scale sculptures, inspired by a futuristic virtual world he created during the pandemic. Accessed via a pristine white circular staircase, the subterranean space with its concrete pillars and oil-stained walls is destined to become one of the world's most talked about art venues.

Having been relocated from its former underground home in the old building, the expanded Yiribana Gallery of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art now enjoys prominent billing near the entrance of Sydney Modern. Regular visitors will recognise old favourites, such as Death Zephyr by Yhonnie Scarce and Fruit bats by Lin Onus, together with striking new commissions, including Grace Lillian Lee's stunning woven body suits and Lorraine Connelly-Northey's sculptures made out of salvaged metal. Displayed in the gallery's glass-sided loggia, the sculptures are one of several artworks that are visible from both inside and outside the new building.

Leading the culinary charge in the new building is boundary-pushing chef Clayton Wells, who's best known for his innovative work at the soon-to-close two-hatted Chippendale eatery, Automata. Mod Dining is a more relaxed affair, offering an all-day dining experience in an airy indoor/outdoor venue. Sit inside overlooking the 11-metre-high central atrium or outside with views of Woolloomooloo Bay and enjoy creative dishes such as fried prawn sandwich with old bay mayo and spanner crab noodles with dashi miso sauce.

Initially, you'll be lured out onto the viewing terrace by Flowers that Bloom in the Cosmos, an eye-popping 4.5-metre-high floral sculpture by 93-year-old Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama. Prominently displayed overlooking Woolloomooloo Bay, it's another site-specific commission that's visible both day and night. Tear yourself away from that and you'll realise that the spacious terrace also offers a rarely-seen panorama of the city - a sweeping vista that includes the Royal Botanic Garden, Woolloomooloo naval docks and the vibrant suburb of Potts Point.

With its distinctive curved orange resin wall (made by Northern Beaches surfboard shaper Hayden Cox), Sydney Modern's gallery shop is an artwork in itself. Inside you'll find a wide range of exclusive merchandise (everything from socks and bucket hats to enamel pins and jigsaw puzzles) reflecting collaborations with artists including Yayoi Kusama and Takashi Murakami. Sure to be a hit with kids are the "camp dog"-themed products developed alongside artists from the Wik and Kugu Arts Centre in the Cape York Peninsula.

Fancy yourself as a sculptor? Thanks to South Korean conceptual artist Kimsooja, you can unleash your inner Michelangelo as part of Archive of Mind, her participatory installation in the Making Worlds exhibition. After taking a seat around a vast 19-metre-wide circular table, you'll be given some coloured clay to mould into a ball before rolling it onto the surface to join a collective artwork comprising hundreds of other mini-masterpieces.

Thanks to Sydney Modern's capacious interior, it can present works on a scale that were never possible in the old building. The best example of this is Groundloop, a dazzling moving image artwork by award-winning New Zealand artist Lisa Reihana that's displayed on a 19-metre-wide screen in the towering internal atrium. Depicting an ancient voyage between New Zealand and Australia, the mesmerising video has an accompanying soundtrack you can access using your phone.

You could easily miss Lee Mingwei's Spirit House. At the northern end of lower level 2, a glass door opens onto a small outdoor courtyard, where a winding path leads to an alcove carved out of a rammed earth wall. Inside is a specially commissioned bronze Buddha that was created by Mingwei in response to an interaction he had with a Buddhist sculpture in the gallery in 1999. Once a day, a wrapped stone will be placed in the Buddha's hand and if you're the lucky person present at the time, you'll be invited to take it with you of the rest of your visit.

With all the attention being lavished on the North Building, it's easy to forget that the original building has also been renewed and refreshed. In addition to a complete rehang of the collection, there are two striking new commissions - a life-size rubbing of a Canary Island date palm by Simryn Gill and a panel of hooded figures above the entrance by Wiradjuri artist Karla Dickens. Don't miss the revitalised 20th-century galleries, which are now home to Ken Unsworth's much-loved Suspended Stone Circle II, a stunning two-storey installation of 103 river stones suspended by 309 wires.