Hong Kong’s take on MoMA? M+ museum, six months on – the city’s only global visual culture hub might have taken Covid-19 knocks, but presents a unique art destination for local visitors

May 27 , 2022

Visitors at M+ Museum in West Kowloon Cultural District in April. Photo: Jonathan Wong

M+ shows rarely seen pieces like Marcel Duchamp’s La Boîte-en-valise and the works of moving image pioneer Nalini Malani – but has only been truly open for 11 weeks due to restrictions

Few international tourists visited the West Kowloon Cultural District site, but locals have enjoyed the museum, which has been likened to London’s Tate Modern and New York’s MoMA

Since opening six months ago, over 580,000 visitors have passed through the doors of Hong Kong’s only museum of visual culture, M+. Realistically though, this figure covers just an 11-week period, with the museum being closed the rest of the time because of Covid-19 restrictions. Additionally, almost all visitors to its West Kowloon Cultural District site have been Hong Kong residents, with limited international footfall due to the same restrictions.

These numbers, for Doryun Chong, deputy director, curatorial, and chief curator, is affirmation of the impact made.

“Essentially, 99.9 per cent of visitors have been Hong Kong residents, who immediately embraced the institution,” he said. “In Hong Kong they have never seen anything like it, and those visitors who have been to other major metropolitan museums, like London’s Tate Modern, or New York’s MoMA (Museum of Modern Art), are proud that their home city has a museum of the same calibre.”

Nalini Malani’s Can You Hear Me? (2018-20), a nine-channel digital video installation. Photo: M+

In addition, Chong said that the opening represents “a whole new arts and culture ecology, that has grown exponentially, in a very rich way”.

This is a viewpoint shared by museum director Suhanya Raffel: “M+ has added substantially to Hong Kong’s arts and cultural ecology. We are one voice of many, but we are a very substantial voice. For the first time in Hong Kong, we have a global museum. It is about taking Hong Kong to the international world and bringing the rest of the world into Hong Kong. It’s a very important role that we play in terms of the positioning.”

That M+ is unique in Hong Kong is also of significance, stemming from the fact that it is a museum of visual culture, representing a variety of art forms under one roof, including art, design, architecture and moving image. “There is no institution like this in Asia,” Raffel said.

Suhanya Raffel, museum director at M+. Photo: Visual Voices/M+

Playing such a significant role is something that the team takes very seriously.

“Our curators across the exhibitions, collections and learning spaces are all scholars, specialists and leaders in their own right in that space,” Raffel said. The diversity of the team is also of note, with 27 nationalities represented.

Also playing a significant role is the diverse selection on display throughout the museum.