West Kowloon’s Two Museums: M+ and the Hong Kong Palace Museum Side by Side

Two of Hong Kong’s major museums opened within eight months of each other on the Victoria Harbour waterfront of the West Kowloon Cultural District.

M+

M+ opened to the public on 12 November 2021. It was designed by Herzog & de Meuron with Farrells, has 65,000 square metres of floor space, and opened with six exhibitions across 33 galleries and spaces and about 1,500 works from its collection. A 66-metre LED display runs along one side of the building, and a 12-storey LCD screen shows artworks. Admission was free for the first 12 months.

Hong Kong Palace Museum

The Hong Kong Palace Museum followed on 2 July 2022, at 8 Museum Drive. It is a collaboration between the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority and the Palace Museum, designed by Rocco Design Architects Associates, with seven storeys, a site of 13,000 square metres and about 30,000 square metres of floor area. It has nine galleries and opened with 914 treasures shown in rotation, more than 100 loans from local institutions and 13 objects from the Louvre.

Reading them together

M+ concerns visual culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; the Palace Museum concerns the imperial collections of China. Between them they give the district two reasons to go.