A museum of the future
Since its opening in 2021 M+, Asia’s first global museum of contemporary visual culture has forged a new path for what a truly 21st century institution can be, grappling with the many afterlives of utopian globalisation.
Text by Thomas Roueché
Hong KongArea: 1,115 km2
Time zone: GMT+8
Hong Kong is a special administrative region of the People’s Republic of China. With 7.4 million residents of various nationalities in a 1,115-square-kilometre territory, Hong Kong is the fourth most densely populated region in the world.
In Wilson Shieh Ka-ho’s drawings, the artist refashions Hong Kong’s iconic skyline as dresses. Hong Kong City Hall Sits at Connaught Road (2007) presents the city as an intimate, personal gathering that poses the question of who, or what, lies behind the glittering wealth projected by Hong Kong’s architecture. The downcast, disinterested faces of his subjects bring a soft, camp sensibility to the hard concrete, glass and steel that represents the world’s third most important financial centre.
Hong Kong’s skyline has long been synonymous with globalisation, as familiar from the cover of economics textbooks as it is from film or TV. The city’s skyscrapers, seen from the colonial-era Star Ferry, offer competing snapshots of Hong Kong’s history. The solid and secure Jardine House, an icon of 1970s British commerce; I.M. Pei’s glittering, orthogonal Bank of China, amongst the Chinese-American architect’s greatest works; the 1980s futuristic postmodernism of Paul Rudolph’s Bond Centre; Foster+Partners’s HSBC building, redolent of the finance boom of the heady 1990s. Colonial entrepôt, global city, gateway to a rising China, futuristic high-tech metropolis – the many meanings and narratives of Hong Kong, past, present and future, jostle each other for attention.
The 2021 opening of M+, Asia’s first global museum of contemporary visual culture, was a striking new addition to this skyline, and a new place for narrative-making about the city itself. M+ is one of a number of museums and cultural spaces developed as part of the West Kowloon Cultural District, a 40-hectare area of land reclaimed from Victoria Harbour in the 1990s. It is, no doubt, the most ambitious, aiming to rival the Tate Modern, MoMA and the Centre Pompidou in its collections, size and programming. Designed by Herzog & de Meuron, the building is dramatic, its entire facade functioning as an LED screen that looks out over the harbour towards Hong Kong Island. The museum is at once public artwork and television screen, putting video art in dialogue with the famous glowing logos that illuminate the harbourside.
M+ opened at a complex crossroads in Hong Kong’s history. Since 2013, Art Basel Hong Kong had presented the city as the art world’s preeminent Asian hub; from its inception, M+ seemed to underline this story. Despite this, tensions between China and the West had been exacerbated during the Trump presidency, and a clampdown on political expression – specifically, the introduction of a national security bill – had led to protests in the streets of the city. The 1990s and 2000s doctrine of American-led globalisation, in which Hong Kong had played an important role, had begun to ebb even before the pandemic imposed strict quarantine rules and border controls. More recently, anxieties over Mainland China’s economy have seized the headlines. A city that hovered in the Western imagination as the ultimate example of Asian futurism turned out to have an uncertain future after all. This backdrop would have been a fraught context for the curatorial team of any institution.
Hong Kong City Hall Sits at Connaught Road (2007) by Wilson Shieh Ka-ho casts an ironic lens on the city’s skyscrapers (image courtesy M+). Opposite, a view through the city from the Island Shangri-La hotel reveals the facade of M+ on the Kowloon side of the harbour, to the right of the West Kowloon Cultural District park.
M+ connects to its local context while at the same time transcending it – rethinking Asian contemporary culture from a trans-national perspective
In the midst of this uncertainty, M+ cuts a dramatic path. Its curatorial team have fashioned a profoundly contemporary museum, one that interrogates assumptions of what a museum in Hong Kong ought to be. The uncertainties they have faced have encouraged a degree of self-reflexivity and responsiveness that feels rare in an arts institution of this scale. Fundamentally, M+ connects to its local context while at the same time transcending it – presenting a case for rethinking Asian contemporary culture from a trans-national perspective, while at the same time recognising Hong Kong’s place within it.
Guo Pei: Fashioning Imagination, the museum’s major exhibition of the Chinese fashion designer, opened in September, and exemplifies this approach. Curated by Yokoyama Ikko, the show draws Pei’s designs into a dialogue with works from the M+ collection. What emerges from this conversation is a nuanced meditation on design across East Asia.
Guo Pei is famous as the first Asian designer to become a guest member of the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture in Paris. Born in Beijing in 1967, she graduated with a degree in fashion design in the mid-1980s, as reformist politics began to reshape the Chinese economy; her career has tracked the transformation of the Chinese cultural economy. Pei’s designs featured prominently during the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, though it was Rihanna’s selection of a design from that period to wear at the China-themed 2015 Met Gala that transformed Pei into a household name, and representative of a new, global world of fashion.
Pei’s work seems at first to draw upon Chinese traditional arts, but Pei is just as interested in the architecture of mediaeval Europe, or the traditional weaving techniques of Japan. For Yokoyama, the eclecticism of Pei’s practice is emblematic of the long past – and present – of postmodernism in Asia, something that is visibly evident throughout the city. Thus, whereas Pei’s complex and ornate designs are often seen through the lens of couture, Yokoyama foregrounds paintings, photographs and collages, putting Pei into dialogue with unusual interlocutors that share her concerns.
The exhibition opens with a work by Bangladeshi artist Aisha Khalid, West Looks East (2013), which draws on her cross-cultural experience as an Asian artist working in the Netherlands. The famous Met Gala dress is also on display, but here it sits next to a bright yellow calligraphic screen print by A. D. Pirous, Surat Rahmat (1976), which draws out a vivid blaze of colour in both works. Wilson Shieh Ka-ho’s representation of Hong Kong sits close to Andreas Gursky’s iconic photograph Hong Kong, Shanghai Bank (1994), which represents the skyscraper as an icon of global capital at the height of optimistic globalisation. Yokoyama moves effortlessly from art to architecture to design to garment, even including an Akari lamp by Noguchi Isamu, minimalist simplicity in play with Pei’s baroque.
Andreas Gursky’s Hong Kong, Shanghai Bank (1994) in dialogue with a work by Guo Pei. Gurksy’s photograph foregrounds the industrious inner workings of the building, emphasising how its architectural patterns encase those who work within it; Pei’s fretwork dress similarly toys with limits and constraints. Photo by Lok Cheng, courtesy M+
The M+ facade is embedded with thousands of LEDs which light up nightly, forming a vast screen that forms a key part of the museum’s programming. Visible from up to 1.5 kilometres away, it is one of the largest media facades in the world. Photo by Iwan Baan, courtesy Herzog & de Meuron
The jaw-dropping view across Victoria Harbour from the Michelin-starred Petrus restaurant on the 56th floor of the Island Shangri-La. The hotel offers a vision of almost unimaginable luxury, blended with an elegant and sophisticated practicality, located right at the heart of the city’s downtown. The hotel rooms offer similarly staggering views, and there is a second Michelin-starred restaurant, Summer Palace, on site. The hotel offers to chauffeur its guests to the airport in a cyan Rolls Royce.
View of facade, Bank of China Tower (1982-1989), Hong Kong, South Ho Siu Nam, 2021, courtesy M+
Amidst this riot of colour, texture and fantastical reference it is perhaps a small and quiet work that best captures the unusual proposition of this exhibition. Okanoue Toshiko’s postcard-sized collage Maiden (1951) is a humble work in black and white. As a young woman in post-war Japan, Okanoue created collages that provide a window onto a surreal time. Okanoue made this work, like her others, by cutting out and collaging images from the many imported Western magazines that were available after the war, folding the language of Western capitalism into the traditional Japanese collage art of chigiri-e, in which different coloured pieces of handmade paper are torn and recombined to create an image. Her work provided a haunting perspective from a country undergoing profound, dislocating change.
This omivorous approach to design is equally felt in the archival exhibition I.M. Pei: Life is Architecture, which opened this summer, curated by Aric Chen and Shirley Surya. The Chinese-born Pei lived and worked for most of his life in America, yet his Bank of China Tower is an icon of the Hong Kong skyline, and this show feels like something of a home-coming. Pei turned down many curators keen to show his work in the context of a museum during his lifetime, so it is in this posthumous exhibition, which draws deeply from his archive, that the trajectory of his work – from his childhood in Shanghai and Hong Kong, to his adulthood in a New York dominated by the International Style, and his apotheosis as a poet of concrete and glass – is brought together in all its epic scale.
Okanoue Toshiko, Maiden (1951). While understanding her collages to be deeply rooted in traditional Japanese culture, Okanoue’s practice was also greatly influenced by her encounter with the surrealist Max Ernst’s work. Image courtesy M+
The story of Pei’s career has often been reduced to the controversy around his design for the Louvre, a classic narrative of old-meets-new architectural ambition that characterised the late-20th century move towards a wider globalised aesthetic of design. A large section of the show, structured like the famous pyramid, reproduces articles from the height of the controversy, the racism of their critiques laid plain to see. What emerges from Life is Architecture, by contrast, is the biography of a thoughtful, cultured man whose holistic approach to the design of libraries and institutions created an architectural language that transcends locality and tradition in search of an unique architectural idiom.
Underlying the success of these shows is the long slow work of acquisition undertaken by M+ over the last decade. An important part of this is the Sigg Collection, one of the largest and most significant collections of contemporary Chinese art in the world, donated by the Norwegian businessman and former ambassador to Hong Kong, Uli Sigg, in whose name the museum runs a biennial prize for emerging Chinese artists, and has named a number of galleries.
The museum is also particularly committed to preserving the design heritage of Asia. Two iconic architectural structures stand out: a large triangular fragment from Kikutake Kiyonori’s Metabolist Expo Tower from the 1970 Osaka World Exposition and an entire sushi bar designed by Kuramata Shiro, reconstructed here by the expert Japanese craftsmen who originally built it. In 2019, M+ acquired the entire archive of Archigram, the British architecture collective. Video is another important strand, as evidenced by the building’s facade project, and currently an ambitious video-based exhibition explores the role of Shan shui landscape painting in contemporary art, culminating in Liu Chuang’s masterpiece Bitcoin Mining and Field Recordings of Ethnic Minorities (2018).
Throughout, this idea of an Asian postmodernism, a specifically local attempt to grapple with the strange dreams and afterlives of the promise of utopian globalisation, is a powerful curatorial principle. Small exhibitions, such as that of the local graphic designer Henry Steiner, The Art of Graphic Communication (responsible, amongst so much else, for HSBC’s famous hexagonal logo) present alternative cultural histories of the history of Hong Kong. The collection also includes work by artists like Tsang Tsou-choi, known as the King of Kowloon, whose distinctive graffiti were a feature of the city’s urban fabric itself.
Trevor Yeung’s plant-filled studio looks out over the forested trees behind Fo Tan. His neighbour in the building is the photographer South Ho, who took the photo of IM Pei’s iconic Bank of China Tower, opposite.
The history of Hong Kong is one of informal, cross-regional connection bolstered by the diverse migrant populations of the city
Forthcoming exhibitions – such as Picasso for Asia: a Conversation and Canton Modern: Art and Visual Culture in Guangdong 1900s–1970s – highlight these local and international currents. M+ also champions young regional artists, through the Sigg Prize, but also with projects such as Courtyards of Detachments, an exhibition by Hong Kong artist Trevor Yeung which was first shown as a collateral event at the Venice Biennale earlier in 2024, and will return in 2025 to the museum itself.
At Yeung’s Fo Tan studio, in Hong Kong’s New Territories, the artist lives amongst plants, fish tanks, citrine crystal balls and other objects that inspire and become part of his own art. The building is a large, industrial highrise with views through Yeung’s fecund house plants over densely forested trees, a world away from the intensity of West Kowloon’s cool downtown urbanism. Yeung’s playful and meditative work casts a queer, ecological and mystical lens over the city, one that speaks to the resilience of local forms and ways of being.
In March this year, Yeung opened Soft Breath at Para Site, a gallery in the Quarry Bay neighbourhood, which lays claim to be the first independent art institution in Hong Kong, and indeed one of the oldest and most active spaces in Asia. Billy Tang, its executive director and a frequent collaborator of Yeung’s, explains how it began as a non-profit space in 1996, and since then has been a vital part of the city’s independent scene. (Tobias Berger, the first curator of visual arts at M+, was previously executive director.) As in his Venice show Yeung’s preoccupations in his Para Site show were entanglements of all kinds – informed by queer experience and ranging between people and across species.
For Tang, the history of Hong Kong has always been one of informal, cross-regional connection – to Southeast Asia, to the Philippines, to Japan – bolstered by the diverse migrant populations of the city that are often looked in the political binary that creates an opposition between Hong Kongers and Mainland Chinese. In September, Para Site hosted Cloud Chamber, an exhibition of the work of Art Labor, a Ho Chi Minh City-based collective formed by Thao Nguyen Phan, Truong Cong Tung and Arlette Quynh-Anh Tran. The exhibition sought to reflect on and reimagine the complex history of the Central Highlands of Vietnam, but its overall project, that of the “Cloud Chamber” wherein matter and antimatter react to each other, reflecting local indigenous beliefs, offers a tentative attempt to think beyond the strictures of the present moment in a wide variety of contexts.
One of Christopher K. Ho’s gold sculptural meditations on form, drawn from John Hejduk’s principles. (Installation photo by Felix SC Wong, courtesy the artist and PHD Group.) Hejduk, who worked with I.M. Pei in New York, was initially preoccupied with fiercely modernist principles of space-making. K. Michael Hays has described Hejduk’s objects as seeming “impossibly, to be aware of us, to address us. And yet we see not the gratifying reflection of ourselves we had hoped for but another thing, looking back at us, watching us, placing us”
A short distance away, in Goose Neck Bridge, PHD (Property Holdings Development) Group was showing an exhibition of the work of Christopher K. Ho, I am a 70-Year-Old British Sculptor – a series of 10 abstract drawings and 30 golden sculptures, created through the spatial composition techniques of John Hejduk. Ho’s work is at first a strikingly beautiful meditation on form, material and space, and then begins to invite a cascade of questions.
PHD Group is a gallery whose director, Willem Molesworth, describes as being “a fundamentally post-M+ space.” For Molesworth, a space like this, which he runs with his wife Ysabelle Cheung in an old clubhouse owned by her grandfather on the top floor of a 1970s highrise building, would not and could not exist without the institutional energy given to Hong Kong by the establishment of a world-class museum such as M+, one with a commitment to creating a trans-Asian narrative of contemporary culture. Yet it also feels rooted, strangely contingent, the sort of space that would be unimaginable in any other city.
Every museum is a product of the ideology of its context. MoMA was shaped by the edicts of mid-century criticism and Abstract Expressionism. The Centre Pompidou responded to the politico-cultural ideas of André Malraux. The Tate Modern opened at the highpoint of Blairite arts funding and a state-supported renaissance of confidence in British arts and culture. M+ has emerged amid choppier waters, conceived at a highpoint of globalisation but born into a world of national retrenchment. Despite, or indeed perhaps because of these pressures, it remains strikingly free of the heavy 20th-century ideologies that shaped its predecessors. The result is a museum that, in these uncertain times, may, perhaps, begin to offer a new narrative of the future – of Hong Kong’s, and the world’s. .
Works in Cloud Chamber at Para Site in Quarry Bay. (Photo by Studio Lights On, courtesy Para Site). Top, Kuramata Shiro’s Kiyotomo sushi bar opened in Tokyo’s Shinbashi district in 1988. The interior, one of few extant by Kuramata – a founding member of the Memphis group – has been acquired by M+ and is a highlight of the design galleries.