Various fine art practices exist in the Maldives at present. Primary among them is drawing and painting. Sculpture and crafts that overlap with art making also exist in the country. However, due to various limitations, they have not flourished as art forms. Painting and drawing also exist in similar circumstances. Lack of avenues in which to exhibit, and lack of arts education and training, combined with a growing understanding that these arts are best served in the tourist souvenir trade, has hampered a healthy development of these arts.

However, with the establishment of private galleries and with various exhibitions organized by the government and the artists themselves, in the last 15 years, the awareness that painting can be an expressive art form apart from also being a lucrative commercial activity has provided encouragement for several young Maldivians to pursue painting, and to an extent sculpture and other public and commercial art forms. Renewed interest in these arts have also led to various individuals to pursue on their own whatever education they can obtain, whether through distance learning courses from foreign universities, or via books and magazines. In addition, privately funded students have also been obtaining arts education and training at undergraduate and graduate levels in international universities.

More indirectly, artists also get the opportunity to meet foreign artists through the tourism trade when foreign artists visit the country as tourists. This provides the much needed contact with artists that is so necessary to the development of any art form.

Until recently, fine arts in the Maldives have been usually defined as the various crafts and skills of craft making. These include the use of locally found materials to produce decorative and functional objects such as mats, hand held or displayed objects, etc. The present situation of the arts has come about because of a lack of critical and theoretical interpretation and a lack of dialogue and discourse in an organized, sustained or documented form.

As part of the mandate of the National Art Gallery, it is proposed that the defining of art in the Maldives should be an ongoing process, with due respect and reference to the tradition of craft making and artistic expressions that have existed in the country for several centuries, and while accommodating more contemporary cultural influences and technological developments. How much this process of defining art within a Maldivian context should pay heed to existing ideologies of the Maldivian community can also be a point of concern which will have to be constantly appraised.