A museum’s attitude towards its audiences shapes the character of the institution. The global shift in the definition of audiences from passive receivers of information to active participants has been especially pronounced in the short, vibrant history of art museums in China. But how specifically can museums imagine, define, and interact with their audiences today? ‘M+ Matters Keynote: Understanding Museum Audiences’ brings together five contributors from museums in mainland China and Hong Kong to explore this subject. Representing different institutional models—state-run, private, corporate, and community-based—the speakers present their distinct curatorial, operational, and learning strategies. The discussion positions the relationship with audiences as essential to any understanding of the current museum landscape in China.

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Resulting from an open call for papers announced in August 2019, this symposium reappraises Archigram through interpretations of the group’s work in relation to the histories and practice of architecture and urbanism across a wider set of geographies. Organised as a series of three sessions—with each session focusing on a distinct inquiry into Archigram’s work across the issues of inhabitations, figurations, and transmissions—the symposium includes presentations by historians and architects Annette Fierro, Ariel Genadt, Evangelos Kotsioris, Lai Chee Kien, Li Han, Simon Sadler, Hadas Steiner, Tsukamoto Yoshiharu, Mark Wigley, Roger Wu, and Liam Young. In the countercultural spirit of Archigram, presentations will be followed by a ‘Trash History/Theory’ video response by Archigram, before a panel discussion.

M+ Matters: Archigram Cities Online Symposium

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M+ Matters: Archigram Cities – It's Archigram!

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M+ International x Power Station of Art: Archigram Cities

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Open to the public since 1897, Tate is one of the world's leading art institutions and among the most visited in the United Kingdom. It consists of a network of four museums: Tate Britain and Tate Modern in London, Tate Liverpool, and Tate St Ives in Cornwall. The four museums share a national collection of British art from 1500 to the present and international modern and contemporary art, comprising more than seventy thousand items. Tate, like many museums, has in recent years transformed itself in order to remain relevant in the twenty-first century, refurbishing and extending Tate Britain and Tate Modern, launching the Tate Exchange collaborative learning programme, and organising international partnerships and collaborations. In this upcoming M+ Matters Keynote, Maria Balshaw, Director of Tate, discusses the significance of these projects and the institution's overall strategy in the context of a global sociopolitical climate that is shifting more rapidly than ever. More broadly, she explores the challenges and opportunities facing museums as they strive to continue to find a balance between reflecting current situations and remaining impartial, inclusive, and open.

‘M+ Matters: Conversations on Women, Architecture, and the City’ is a joint effort between M+ and the University of Hong Kong Faculty of Architecture, which seeks to initiate public conversations in Hong Kong on the under-represented histories and contemporary realities of women in architectural production. The discussions examine the life and work of nine women and their roles in shaping the built environment in Asia, prompting the reappraisal of criteria and methods used to assess architecture.

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‘Building Louvre Abu Dhabi’ focuses on the new museum, which opened in November 2017 following a decade of planning and construction. Louvre Abu Dhabi is a collegial effort between France and the United Arab Emirates to create a visionary museum that inherits the tradition of the French institution whilst embracing the multicultural dynamics of the Arab world. This aspiration pervades the Jean Nouvel–designed building, which features a low-slung dome that evokes the architecture of a mosque and a mausoleum. The dome is pierced with openings and resembles interwoven palm leaves assembled into a lattice, proposing a contemporary reading of a traditional form. At the core of the museum’s mission is the notion of universal human values, which is enacted through collecting and programming activities that bridge the Louvre’s long history with the distinctive cultural context of Abu Dhabi. Manuel Rabaté is deeply connected with Louvre Abu Dhabi, through his work at Agence France-Muséums to lay the groundwork for the project, and now as the museum’s first director. Rabaté discusses the building of this twenty-first-century encyclopedic museum as ‘a museum of experimentation, and a museum of meeting points’.

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This day-long session brings together four internationally renowned practitioners from across Asia, Europe, and the United States, in conversation with writer and curator Kerry Doran. These artists and designers all use online tools to create born-digital work that processes, visualises, and critiques the social effects of technology, while developing alternative propositions for how we relate to the internet. These four discussions are intended to foster public discourse around how mass data collection, artificial intelligence, simulations, social media, and video-game design are being explored by contemporary practitioners working in the constantly changing online world.

‘M+ Matters: Post-1949 Visual and Material Culture in China’ is a public talk that considers critical issues in the first decades of the socialist state in China through a multidisciplinary lens, examining design and visual art. Bringing together three international scholars and curators, it aims to propose new ways of appraising the highly complex narratives of socialist cultural production in China, which have often been overlooked by historians.

Following the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the Chinese state devised visual and material strategies to achieve its particular conception of socialist modernity. The talk builds on pioneering studies that contextualise and re-examine the manifestations of this modernity—often positioned as alternative or oppositional—across geographies, time, and disciplines within China’s shifting socio-economic and political frameworks.

In M+ Matters Keynote: Miracle of the Benesse Art Site Naoshima, Soichiro Fukutake along with two of his collaborators, the celebrated Japanese architects, Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of SANAA and the international artistic director of the project, Akiko Miki reflect on the project and explain how the art viewing experience creates a visually engaging journey in dialogue with a local context. The talk also highlights the transformative effect that the Benesse Art Site Naoshima has had on its location, and how the project has been regenerating the communities and economic fabric of the isolated and depopulating region and establishing them as a successful and sustainable cultural destination in Asia.

REORIENT is M+’s first public event to focus exclusively on the region of South and Southeast Asia. From its early stages of formation, the M+ collection has encompassed works by South and Southeast Asian artists and makers, but the region(s) have yet to feature prominently as part of the museum’s public programme. With REORIENT, M+ ‘reorients’ attention southward by bringing together key practitioners, curators, researchers and thinkers from the fields of visual art, design and architecture and moving image, and from various locales in South and Southeast Asia, to present and discuss critical issues and multiplicities related to their practice, institutions and contexts. Designed to inform Hong Kong audiences about the important work being done by individuals and institutions in the region, REORIENT also seeks to examine affinities and intersections between cultural practices in Hong Kong and the global south.

Part of the on-going M+ Matters series of public talks and discussions, Between Past and Future: Art of the Pearl River Delta welcomes keynote speakers Hou Hanru (Artistic Director, MAXXI) and Chan Koonchung (Writer) to present and participate in a panel discussion with Cao Fei (Artist), Chen Tong (Founder, Libreria Borges), Feng Yuan (Professor, Sun Yat-sen University) and Sara Wong (Artist and Co-Founder, Para Site). The symposium examines the trajectory of urbanisation in the Pearl River Delta since China was opened up for economic reform in the late 1970s, looking at how the phenomenon has shaped the development of art and culture in the region and its relevance for today’s socio-political context.

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As part of the programme at Atelier Clerici, the leading hub of critical thinking during the annual Salone del Mobile in Milan, Copies without Borders: Imitation as Innovation brings M+ and its M+ Matters format to an international stage, enriching the global discourse about copying as a methodology in contemporary design practice.

The characterisation of copying—of designs, ideas, and products—as a destabiliser of economic systems, a scourge on ‘legitimate’ modes of production, and even a moral-ethical failing can be seen as a relatively new phenomenon that arose during the Industrial Revolution. However, in a post-industrial, digital, and more culturally hybridised era, these biases are becoming increasingly difficult to delineate, defend, and maintain. Bringing together leading international design practitioners, curators, and thinkers, this panel discussion explores alternative ways of thinking about copying as a generative act that produces both frictions and new potentials as it migrates across geographic borders.

M+ Matters: Confronting Activist Art and Design from a Museological Perspective examines creative practices arising from acts of civil disobedience and movements for social change, and the questions, challenges, opportunities, and obligations they present for collections-based museums of visual culture. Often ad hoc, spontaneous, and site-specific, this genre of creative production, whether generated by professional, grassroots, or informal actors, provokes further debate concerning its place, and appropriateness, within an institutional setting and framework.

In light of the 2014 Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong and other mass protests around the world, this talk will explore key issues such as: What are the politics, and political implications, of a museum collecting and exhibiting activist work or, conversely, avoiding the subject altogether? How does one define the ‘work’—as a creative expression, a document, a historical artefact? And how might this shape collecting criteria? What place, if any, does contemporary activism have in a museum, and might institutional inclusion also represent a form of co-option?

'Expanding the 1980s: The Landscape of Art in China and East Asia' highlights the development of contemporary Chinese art in relation to its surrounding countries during the crucial transitional period of the 1980s. Through examining the political and cultural changes during the decade in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, the symposium aims to explore subtle ties between contemporary Chinese art and modernist movements from the prewar period, as well as how different individual art practices were influenced by political transitions in history. At the same time, it will also probe into the cultural and political landscapes of Japan and Korea in the final years of the Cold War and at the beginning of globalisation. The symposium continues M+'s sustained studies of differences, and also of parallels among artistic practices in the wider region, prior to the frequent and free exchanges in the age of globalisation.

➔ Watch At the Crossroads of the East | Kuiyi Shen

'Global Museums' Collection and Display Strategies Today' presents views from three standard-setting museums of modern and contemporary art in the world—The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; Tate Modern, London; and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. Although all three museums can be said to have started out with a primarily local and limited international mandate, they have, in recent years, embraced—and perhaps also struggled with—a more international, even global scope in their collecting and display strategies. Given their discrete histories as well as their unique structures and strategies of acquisition, the resulting collections also differ considerably from one another. This M+ Matters symposium will address a series of questions, including: How do these museums deal with a 'global' mandate? Why has it been considered necessary, and will it continue to be necessary in the future? What roles are China, East Asia, and even broader Asia playing in their collections and programmes? What can M+ learn from their successes and possible shortcomings, and as a new museum of visual culture in Hong Kong, what can we offer them in return in the coming years?

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What does it mean to have "global perspectives"? What are they and how might we define, develop or communicate them?

"Theorising Art Histories Globally" brings together three important thinkers and practitioners who are building new intellectual frameworks for understanding an art world that is undergoing continuous if — uneven — globalisation. M+ is a new kind of institution that is shaped by the particular historical conditions of Hong Kong, with its unique postcolonial yet global nature. As contemporary Chinese art matures, evolving beyond an explosive market phenomenon to become a well-regarded area of research, and as contemporary Hong Kong art gains legitimacy, respect, and even urgency, this is a timely moment in which to consider the topic of globalisation in art in more critical ways. What might be a new theoretical lens through which we can understand the current and future state of art history, as it grows increasingly global?

Watch A Case Study of Postwar Japanese Art | Michio Hayashi

Watch Shifting Gravity — And Then What? | Ute Meta Bauer

Watch Heritage and Debt | David Joselit

'Import/Export: Postwar Design and Industry in East Asia' will place at the forefront one of the cornerstones of the economic and cultural transformation of East Asia in the later 20th century: mass-produced consumer objects. In so doing, the discussion seeks to identify, map and trace some of the key products, networks, phenomena and influences that acted throughout the region, linking Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, mainland China and other territories to each other and the rest of the world — while giving rise to their export booms and fuelling their consumer, design and visual cultures. Going beyond orthodox, canonical approaches and their emphases on authorship and pedigree, and styles and movements, the discussion will further explore the conceptual and curatorial frameworks that might inform M+'s strategy for collecting such objects. Issues such as copying and authorship; the adaptation and invention of design typologies and vocabularies; and the role of global capitalism and its systems of marketing, production and distribution will also be considered.

'Import/Export: Postwar Design and Industry in East Asia' is the first M+ Matters to take place in two cities: Hong Kong and Shenzhen.

The first in the 2014-2015 series of M+ Matters, "Postwar Abstraction in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan", will chart the development of modernist abstraction from an East Asian perspective. The symposium will highlight the various artistic concerns and explorations in the painting medium through abstraction and to consider new strategies of collecting and display using a comparative art history framework. Special attention will be given to the relationship between ink art and abstract painting in the postwar period, to enrich and expand the existing discourse of ink art through a transnational lens.

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M+ Matters ARTWORKDOCUMENTATION consists of two evening panel discussions that attempt to unpack the multiple roles that an object (or image) can inhabit — documentation, archive, evidence, historical record, material support — and how these align with our understandings of "the work". Inviting specialists and practitioners from diverse backgrounds, ARTWORKDOCUMENTATION will look at the ways in which conceptions about "artworks" are in flux, and how these shifts — particularly in the institutional context — can engender new ways of thinking about collections, exhibitions and display.

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Against the backdrop of the longstanding debates over the evolving roles of museums — as repositories for artifacts, catalysts for economic development, hothouses for cultural advocacy or, increasingly, instruments of "soft power" — comes an unprecedented phenomenon in the hundreds of museums that are being built in mainland China.

Often tied directly to the rapid growth and growing ambitions of Chinese cities, many of these museums arise more from economic, bureaucratic and urban-development imperatives than curatorial ones. As the third in the M+ Matters series, "Of the Moment: China's Museum Boom in Context" will present the initial findings of research, now underway by Columbia University's China Megacities Lab, into the architectural and urbanistic implications surrounding China's new contemporary art museums. At the same time, we aim to place this survey within broader historical trajectories of museum-making, in order to pose questions about China's current museum models, and where M+ potentially fits within this dynamic landscape.

"Histories and Individual Practices of Contemporary Ink Art" is a public symposium that explores the discourse of ink art in artistic experimentation from the '85 Art New Wave period to the present. Featuring presentations by leading scholar and curator, Martina Kӧppel-Yang; artists Yang Jiechang and Qiu Zhijie; and moderated by Pi Li, Sigg Senior Curator at M+, this forum will focus on how ink art has freed itself from the narrow confines of tradition and has transformed into a contemporary artistic language that engages with wider developments in the 20th and 21st century.

Topics: Points of Origin

• Ink Art in Hong Kong — Past and Future by Wucius Wong
• Where do we begin? Historical amnesia in a contemporary art context by Jane DeBevoise
• The Internal Logic and Cultural Conditions of the Development of Chinese Ink Painting since the 1950s: On the Relationship between the Experimental Ink Art Movement and the Chinese Avant-garde by Pi Daojian
• The Formation and Development of New Ink Art in China by Lu Hong

Topics: Points of Exchange

• Ink Art in the White Cube by Johnson Chang
• Ink Art in Chinese Private Collections since the 1980s by Zhao Li
• Give me a Brush by Yang Jiechang

Topics: Points of Perception

• Negotiating with Tradition in Contemporary Chinese Art: Three Strategies by Wu Hung
• There is no Ink. Thoughts about a Cultural Matrix by Martina Kӧppel-Yang
• Staying in a State of Notation by Qiu Zhijie

"Asian Design: Histories, Collecting, Curating" is an evening of talks and panel discussions resulting from a workshop organised by M+. The discussion brings together leading international scholars and curators to explore the shifting parameters, and their conceptual and methodological implications, of historicising, collecting and curating Asian design.

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