M+ Opens in West Kowloon After a Decade in the Making

M+, Hong Kong’s museum of twentieth- and twenty-first-century visual culture, opened to the public on 12 November 2021 in the West Kowloon Cultural District. Its collections cover visual art, design and architecture, and moving image, with a particular focus on Hong Kong and on Asia, and its ambition is to stand alongside institutions such as Tate Modern, MoMA and the Centre Pompidou.

The building was designed by Herzog & de Meuron with TFP Farrells, who won the architectural competition in 2013. Seen from across Victoria Harbour, it reads as an upside-down T: a wide horizontal slab that holds most of the galleries, lifted off the ground so that visitors can walk beneath it, and a slim tower rising from its centre with offices, research facilities, restaurants and lounges. The harbour-facing side of the tower is fitted with LEDs and works as a very large screen for moving-image commissions, visible from Hong Kong Island at night.

The museum has about 65,000 square metres of floor space, of which roughly 17,000 square metres are exhibition space across 33 galleries. Below ground, the architects exposed the concrete structure around the airport railway tunnels that pass under the site and turned it into the Found Space, a rough, column-free area for large installations.

The collection held more than 6,400 works at opening. Its foundation was laid in 2012, when the Swiss collector Uli Sigg donated 1,463 works of contemporary Chinese art by 325 artists and the museum bought a further 47. Other holdings include the archive of the British architecture group Archigram and an entire sushi bar designed by Shiro Kuramata.

Six exhibitions opened the building, among them Hong Kong: Here and Beyond, on the city’s visual culture since the 1960s; a chronological presentation of the M+ Sigg Collection; Things, Spaces, Interactions, on design and architecture; and Antony Gormley’s Asian Field, an installation of tens of thousands of clay figures made with villagers in Guangdong in 2003. The museum is led by director Suhanya Raffel.

For visitors to Hong Kong, M+ changes the shape of a stay. It gives the Kowloon waterfront a cultural anchor a short distance from Rosewood Hong Kong and the Tsim Sha Tsui hotels, and enough material for a full day.