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M+ museum of visual culture
PostMagTravel
Mercedes Hutton
Mercedes Hutton

Destinations Known | Hong Kong’s long-delayed M+ museum opens, but it may not put city on the cultural tourism map given Covid-19 travel curbs and security law

  • A Legislative Council presentation from July 2011 envisioned M+ as ‘a museum of its time and of its place. Hong Kong now’
  • The city is very different today – not least because a national security law may determine what is put on display. Then there is quarantine for visitors

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As an addition to Hong Kong’s tourism portfolio, M+ will prob­ably be a hit – but it may not put the city on the cultural tourism map as firmly as once hoped. Photo: AFP
Mercedes Hutton

All good things come to those who wait, apparently. And so, after years of waiting, Hongkongers have been rewarded for their patience with the multibillion-dollar M+, billed as “Asia’s first global museum of contemporary visual culture”, in the West Kowloon Cultural District.

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A Legislative Council PowerPoint presentation from July 2011 envisioned M+ as “a museum first and foremost for the people of Hong Kong”. One of the slides asserts: “M+ shall be a museum of its time and of its place. Hong Kong now.”

Needless to say, Hong Kong now is a vastly different city to that in 2011, not least because it is administered according to a national security law that squeezes freedom of expression. And that law may thus determine what is put on display at M+.

However, one imagines that most people who visit the museum will be less concerned with what is absent than with what is on show. And at first glance, it looks impressive, both architecturally and in terms of installations. It will also be free to enter for the first year, an offer that was announced in September along with the museum’s opening date, November 12. Expect M+ to be all over Instagram any day now.

M+ in the West Kowloon Cultural District, Hong Kong. It will be free to enter for the first year. Photo: Martin Chan
M+ in the West Kowloon Cultural District, Hong Kong. It will be free to enter for the first year. Photo: Martin Chan
When it was conceived all those years ago, it was hoped that M+ would help put Hong Kong on the cultural tourism map – in Asia at least, if not globally. Seemingly without irony, travel trade fair ITB Berlin has already likened it to Paris’ Centre Pompidou and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, in New York – two stellar institutions that welcome millions of visitors every (non-pandemic) year.
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