POST EDIT: Inside the Hong Kong Palace Museum’s astonishing first special exhibition – one fit for a king

‘Odysseys of Art: Masterpieces Collected by the Princes of Liechtenstein’ offers visitors a rare window into a priceless collection spanning four centuries

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Portrait of the Prince Karl I of Liechtenstein (circa 1622-1623) at the Hong Kong Palace Museum’s “Odysseys of Art: Masterpieces Collected by the Princes of Liechtenstein” exhibition. Photo: Liechtenstein / The Princely Collections, Vaduz-Vienna

Kate Whitehead

Published: 5:15pm, 17 Nov 2022Updated: 9:34am, 18 Nov 2022

The first special exhibition in Hong Kong’s shiny new museum is fit for a king.

“Odysseys of Art: Masterpieces Collected by the Princes of Liechtenstein” boasts treasures that tell the story of collaboration between East and West, and hopes to give Hong Kong back some of its joie de vivre.

The doors to the Hong Kong Palace Museum opened in July, but long before that, while construction on the 13,000-square-metre site at the western tip of the West Kowloon Cultural District was still under way, Dr Daisy Wang Yiyou, the museum’s deputy director, and her team were busy writing letters to colleagues around the world calling for exhibition proposals.

“Luckily, one letter went to Dr Kräftner and he immediately replied,” says Wang on a Zoom call with Dr Johann Kräftner, director of the Princely Collections.

Daisy Wang Yiyou, deputy director of the Hong Kong Palace Museum, at the exhibition. Pictures: May Tse

Assembled over 400 years, the Princely Collections of Liechtenstein is among the most important private art collections in the world, holding about 1,600 paintings, from the early Renaissance to the second half of the 19th century.

For Kräftner, the request from Hong Kong felt serendipitous because he had been hoping to have an exhibition in the city for some time, but hadn’t found a suitable venue.

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