Tania Nugent: I was expecting something different, but not this different. This is the Michoutouchkine-Pilioko Foundation, museum, art gallery and home to two of the South Pacific's best known artists.

French-born Russian, Nicolai Michoutouchkine was already an established artist when he came to the Pacific on a creative pilgrimage, in the 1950s.

Nicolai Michoutouchkine: Colour is very important, the sun, the sun, I have always been in pursuit of the sun.
That's the latest painting I did. It's just the winds, it's just the plants, it's the vaka, it's the Melanesian profile, it's the fishing nets. It's what I think of the South Pacific, the flowers, the boats and the freedom.

Tania Nugent: In 1958 he opened his first gallery in New Caledonia and it caught the attention of a young man from Wallis Island in Polynesia, Aloi Pilioko.

Aloi Pilioko: And Nicolai look me and say come inside. So I go and I never see paintings like that. I see the colour, I think maybe I want to do something like that.

Nicolai Michoutouchkine: But he was an extremely timid young man. He was not talking and one day we found him sitting behind the crate and trying to draw. That was the first drawing, so I was surprised and shaken.

He has by himself developed what he wanted to do, so in the beginning he started painting in oil, then he did some drawings, then he did some needle work on copra bags.

Aloi Pilioko: I painted the people and the animal and the fish and all the ceremonies, the dancing, the market.

When I meet Nicolai I become artist and we have an exhibition all around the world. Russia, I never thought I would go to Russia, Sweden, Japan. Everywhere.

Nicolai Michoutouchkine: It's like a plant that has been planted in a very proper environment. I'm not intruding in what he's doing, I'm not directing him. He just finds his own inspiration and his own inspiration links him very closely to the life of the South Pacific, and that's what you see, that's what he's feeling completely.

He just doesn't stop, he paints the stones, he paints whatever it is, he personalise it and that's what is absolutely remarkable.

Tania Nugent: Even the bathroom.

Aloi Pilioko: Even my hair... yellow hair. If I no meet Nicolai I no become artist.

Nicolai Michoutouchkine: Of course probably there was a kind of personal relationship many, many years ago but it has developed more into a kind of working twins situation. Whatever he says I have in my mind, whatever in my mind he expresses. It's like my twin brother.