M+ Sets Opening Date for November

Hong Kong’s long-awaited M+ Museum for visual culture has announced that it will open its doors to the public on November 12. The Herzog & de Meuron-designed building in the West Kowloon Cultural District, overlooking Victoria Harbour, will house the first international museum encompassing art, architecture, design, and moving-image works in Asia, spanning the second half of the 20th century to the present.

M+’s lineup of opening exhibitions was also announced: “Hong Kong: Here and Beyond,” looks at the city’s visual culture from the 1960s to today; “M+ Sigg Collection: From Revolution to Globalisation” surveys Chinese art from the 1970s through 2000s; “Things, Spaces, Interactions,” spans international design and architecture from the past 70 years; “The Dream of the Museum” highlights conceptual art practices in contemporary art; “Individuals, Networks, Expressions” traces postwar visual art; and an installation of Antony Gormley’s Asian Field (2003) project, comprising tens of thousands of figures made over the course of five days by 300 villagers in Guangdong province.

In an opening announcement video, M+’s executive director, Suhanya Raffel, vowed that the museum is a “place for everyone” that will be a “facility and resource” for visitors. M+ board chairman Victor Lo said the aim of the museum was to be “a catalyst encouraging the public in Hong Kong to be more interested in art, culture, and creativity.” Mori Art Museum director Mami Kataoka welcomed M+ to the international museum community, while Tate director Maria Balshaw said “it’s thrilling to think that Tate Modern now has a counterpart museum in Hong Kong.”

An opening ceremony will take place on November 11, and the subsequent three weekends will feature a special program of performances, talks, tours, and other live and online events. Admission for Hong Kong residents will be free for one year.

M+ is the first of two major museums that will anchor the West Kowloon Cultural District, with the Hong Kong branch of the Beijing Palace Museum scheduled to open in mid-2022. In the announcement video, Henry Tang Ying-yen, chairman of the board of the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority, said that he was “confident that the opening of M+ will greatly enhance the brand of West Kowloon Cultural District,” a real-estate development and infrastructure project on reclaimed land that has been under development since the 1990s.

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