M+ is Asia’s global museum of contemporary visual culture in Hong Kong. What does that mean?

‘Hong Kong has always been an aspirational, ambitious city. You think of any major global city… it’s culture that defines those cities,’ says M+ Museum Director Suhanya Raffel.

‘M+ is rooted in and inspired by Hong Kong with its long history of exchanges, including colonialism and cosmopolitanism,’ adds Doryun Chong, Artistic Director and Chief Curator at the museum. ‘When you look at the history of Hong Kong, it is literally a gateway.’

This year will see those gates thrown wide open, with M+ making unprecedented contributions to exhibitions in Asia and beyond.

In early September, three exhibitions organised and presented in collaboration with M+ will open in East Asia: Prism of the Real: Making Art in Japan 1989–2010 at The National Art Center in Tokyo, Lee Bul: From 1998 to Now at Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul, and Manifesto of Spring at the National Asian Culture Center in Gwangju.

Last year’s blockbuster, I. M. Pei: Life Is Architecture, which more than 225,000 people saw at M+, is now showing at Shanghai’s Power Station of Art. When that show closes in August, Life Is Architecture will travel to Al Riwaq, an exhibition space next to Doha’s Museum of Islamic Art, which Pei designed.

M+ is also partnering with the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal to show How Modern? Biographies of Architecture in China 1949–1979 and working with Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum on an Ayoung Kim commission.

It’s a wide-ranging, far-reaching, and fast-moving program, befitting M+’s tag line: ‘Asia’s global museum of contemporary visual culture’.

At M+, ‘contemporary visual culture’ encompasses not just art and architecture but also design—Guo Pei: Fashioning Imagination, for example, wrapped at M+ in April—and moving image, which is built into the museum thanks to its 65 x 110-metre LED facade, where Kim’s commission will screen. The M+ Facade lights up from 18:00 to 22:00 nightly and can be seen from up to 1.5 kilometres away.

Raffel says, ‘Jacques Herzog, our architect, talks about the museum being embedded in the earth of West Kowloon and the Facade being the head that speaks to the city.’

As well as being embedded in West Kowloon, M+ is ‘Asia’s global museum’, which may sound contradictory, but Chong says this conception stems back to 2006, when the museum team set themselves a benchmark based on the Museum Advisory Group’s findings and a ‘trifecta of predecessors—Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Centre Pompidou, and Tate Modern—three institutions that opened in 1929, 1977, and 2000, spanning almost the whole 20th century.’

The goal was to be an Asia-based peer of these leading art museums, each of which came to redefine themselves, in different ways, as global institutions, he says. Testament to M+’s progress on this front, the museum signed a comprehensive Memorandum of Understanding with MoMA in February.

Raffel describes M+ as ‘a networked institution that looks at the world from [Asia].’

The world was a little harder to see when the museum opened on 12 November 2021, amid Covid-19 restrictions.

‘It was a blessing in disguise for us to be able to open a global institution [at first exclusively to the people of Hong Kong],’ Chong says. ‘Thinking about our local as well as regional and international visitors all at the same time would have been very challenging.’

M+’s local identity is part of what makes it unique. Artists, architects, and designers from Hong Kong and the People’s Republic of China feature prominently in both the museum’s permanent collection (including more than 1,500 works in the M+ Sigg Collection) and the exhibitions developed by the curators.

‘We are very conscious that we are building destination collections at a destination institution,’ Raffel says. ‘We have a little mantra that says “only at M+”.’

But M+ is not, like most art institutions, a municipal or national museum. It also seeks to provide new perspectives on visual culture from around Asia and globally, as they’ve done by collaborating with Musée national Picasso-Paris on the exhibition Picasso for Asia—A Conversation and by touring their Special Exhibition Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now to Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain and the Serralves Museum in Porto, Portugal, in 2023 and 2024.

Successful touring exhibitions like these can make a meaningful contribution to a museum’s bottom line and long term financial sustainability. Raffel says exporting exhibition IP is important to the museum’s operating budgets, ‘but that’s not why we do it. It's about sharing the knowledge, and we feel that the content we put together is unique.’

There are other highly esteemed, well networked museums in Asia, many of which have been collaborating with museums in American and Europe for longer than M+ has been around, but for Raffel, M+ was the first to see itself as a global cross-disciplinary museum. Beyond visual art, the collection spans design, architecture, moving image, and more.

‘I believe that in Asia there will be many more, but when you are the first you will always be the first,’ she says.