M+ is a museum of visual culture in the West Kowloon Cultural District of Hong Kong. It exhibits twentieth and twenty-first century visual culture encompassing visual art, design and architecture, and moving image. It opened on 12 November 2021.
The M+ Collections focus on twentieth- and twenty-first-century visual culture, encompassing the disciplines of design and architecture, moving image, and visual art, and the thematic area of Hong Kong visual culture. The museum is intended to rival the Tate Modern, New York's MoMA and the Centre Pompidou in terms of the breadth and importance of its collections.
The M+ museum is led by executive director Suhanya Raffel and administered by the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority (WKCDA). A separate subsidiary company will be set up in the future with the aim of ensuring its "independence and efficiency". The inaugural director, Lars Nittve, explained that the name is drawn from the concept of being a "museum and more", and that his team sought to move beyond the typical model of the art museum, for example, by serving as a showcase of diverse subjects like architecture, film, and all manner of moving images including animation and video games.
After an architectural competition, six finalists for the design of the M+ museum were announced in 2012, namely Herzog & de Meuron and Farrells, Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa (SANAA), Renzo Piano Building Workshop, Shigeru Ban and Thomas Chow Architects, Snøhetta, and Toyo Ito and Benoy. Each team was compensated with HK$1 million. The winning design, by Herzog & de Meuron and Farrells, was announced by the WKCDA in June 2013. As part of the Masterplan for the West Kowloon Cultural District designed by Foster + Partners, the architects proposed incorporating the use of underground "found space", referring to the space surrounding the Airport Railway tunnels running directly beneath the site, as a "radical" subterranean exhibition and performance area.
M+ museum design has the basic appearance of an upside-down T. The main horizontal slab housing exhibition spaces is lifted off the ground, permitting pedestrian circulation underneath. Above, a tower houses "public restaurants, lounges and gardens" along with offices and research facilities. Of the structure's total 700,000 square feet (65,000 m2), plans call to reserve 185,000 square feet (17,200 m2) for exhibitions, only slightly more than MoMA. In addition to the interior space, an LED lighting display system is integrated into the facade, serving as a gigantic screen for works of art, visible across Victoria Harbour.
Construction of the M+ museum began in 2014. A time capsule containing artwork of local schoolchildren, to be unsealed 100 years later, was laid on the site in 2015. The museum building was completed in December 2020, with the occupation permit obtained on 24 December 2020.
M+ museum came under fire from some pro-Beijing politicians and newspapers, who alleged that certain works in the museum's collection violated the national security law imposed on Hong Kong by the Chinese government in 2020. These accusations were made amid against the backdrop of broader suppression of Hong Kong's arts sector by pro-government entities. After pro-Beijing politicians accused a piece by Ai Weiwei of "spreading hatred against China", the museum censored the piece, removing it from the M+ website. Ai criticized the decision, stating that M+ cannot achieve its ambition of becoming a world-class cultural facility if it is subject to such censorship.
In response to such concerns, West Kowloon Cultural District head Henry Tang said that the museum must comply with the law.
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