Billed as Asia’s first global museum of contemporary visual culture, M+ will open its doors to the public on November 12 in Hong Kong. Housed in a building designed by Herzog & de Meuron in collaboration with TFP Farrells and Arup, its 17,000 square meters of exhibition space comprise a whopping 33 galleries.

Six inaugural shows map out the museum’s far-reaching collection, which spans visual art, design and architecture, and moving image. The journey begins with ‘Hong Kong: Here and Beyond’, an exploration of the city’s visual culture from the 1960s to the present day, and is followed by ‘M+ Sigg Collection: From Revolution to Globalisation’. The latter exhibition showcases part of the museum’s largest endowment, which gathers 1,453 works (plus 47 acquired) by 350 leading Chinese contemporary artists. The collection was amassed over three decades by businessman and diplomat Uli Sigg, who arrived in China in 1979, establishing the Schindler Group as the first western industrial corporation to sign a joint venture with the state, before serving as the Swiss ambassador to China, North Korea, and Mongolia from 1995 to 1998. Standing alone in the West Gallery is Antony Gormley’s Asian Field, an installation composed of approximately 200,000 clay figures he created in 2003 with inhabitants of the southern Chinese village of Xiangshan, now known as the town of Huadong.

M+ is finally opening its permanent home! How does it feel?

Suhanya Raffel: Exhilarating! It’s an extraordinary moment to see how people from both inside and outside the institution are reacting to it.

Doryun Chong: Aside from excitement, I also feel relieved and reassured. We’ve already had large groups come through representing the spectrum of our audiences, and they have all responded with interest, passion, and attentiveness. That reassures us we’re on the right track.

The exhibitions inaugurating the museum provide a real journey through the scope of its collection. Could you talk about the conceptualization of this program?

DC: We started this conversation five years ago and never veered off course. The story of Hong Kong is at the core, and there is the remarkable story of how contemporary art in mainland China developed. These are two contrasting and complementary stories. We are positioning these within an international context, bracketed by a history of the visual arts and a history of architecture and design. Then we have focused moments like Antony Gormley’s Asian Field, which he produced in mainland China almost 20 years ago, and a self-reflective exhibition, ‘The Dream of the Museum’.

The title ‘The Dream of the Museum’ recalls a point Suhanya once made that the future history of the art museum will be written in Asia – could you expand on that?

SR: This comment was about visual culture and an expanded understanding of what it means to live in the world today vis-à-vis museums, collections, and exhibitions. A colleague who is highly connected in the museum world visited M+ and said they were utterly humbled because they weren’t familiar with what we were showing and felt they were learning from the start. This is important. We are a global institution, but the stories we are telling are unique, and so many of them have not been told enough, whether it’s contemporary Chinese art or how architecture and design have defined Asia’s cities. The urbanism and visual cultures of the big metropolises, from Delhi or Hong Kong to Tokyo and Shanghai, are unique, as are the design and manufacturing innovations that have come out of this part of the world, like the Sony Walkman, which heralded the self-isolation that technology brings.

As a museum, we are lucky to be unfettered by the big history of a large institutional culture, and that gives us room to move laterally. There’s a wonderful commission in the Hong Kong Galleries that renders the elevated walkways of Hong Kong in three dimensions, turning a piece of design – a technical and scholarly study – into physical art. It’s really interesting to bring these things out.

This model of Hong Kong’s walkways speaks to the blending of disciplines and how M+ can expand the concept of visual culture, but it also points to Hong Kong as a place whose architecture reflects transformations in cities across Asia and beyond, including places like Canary Wharf in London and Dubai in the UAE.

DC: You certainly see that in the Main Hall Gallery. The Cities Without Ground project that Suhanya just mentioned was originally an architectural investigation published as a series of drawings, and we commissioned the architects to make a 3D version. In the same space there is an edited video package of iconic Hong Kong cinema works that use Hong Kong as a stage, and around the corner is a little history of computer games set in Hong Kong from the 1980s to the present. In another newly commissioned work by Kongkee, the city as a futuristic inspiration is evident in the cultural expressions that have emerged here in the past few decades. In a sense, Hong Kong has been about futurism for so long that it is almost a retro-futuristic city at this point. This not only talks about the singularity of Hong Kong as a city, but almost positions it as a predecessor, or a template, for Asia’s cities.

This resonates particularly with the cities of the Pearl River Delta, like Shenzhen and Guangzhou, which brings us to China and the Sigg collection, and the history of Chinese contemporary art it captures.

SR: It’s important to say why Uli Sigg did what he did and why he could. Going back to the 1970s and his work with the Schindler Group and later as a diplomat, he was able to travel around the mainland and access communities in a way that others couldn’t at that time. That ability, coupled with a desire to understand Chinese culture through visual art, gave Sigg access to artists and collections. This research led to him building his own collection, and it couldn’t have been done by others.

How does the idea of building collections as a means to learn about other cultures speak to the intersectional histories of visual art from Asia in M+’s holdings?

DC: We certainly have been thinking about inter-regionalism in an expansive way. This is particularly visible in our ink art collection, which immediately connects Hong Kong, Taiwan, mainland China, and the rest of East Asia. But while that informed the early days of building our ink art collection, we soon decided to reorient by looking at East and Northeast Asia as much as South and Southeast Asia.

Another thing we did is not define ink art as a specific medium but as an aesthetic, to really own the history of Modernism without anxieties. Ink is not a pre-Modern medium. It is a Modern and contemporary medium that is experimented with again and again. So we ask what the ink aesthetic is to consider it as a lens for reading artistic expressions from other parts of the world.

This is about how we want to position ourselves. We are a node in the global network of ideas where things originate from different places, but we can also be a central point for looking at the global landscape from a new point of view. It doesn’t matter where things originated – things become adopted and naturalized and mutated, and you can see that across artistic mediums and design practices.

The term ‘global’ draws in the many audiences the museum serves, both across physical and geographical space and across disciplines, languages, and histories. Could you talk about the work that has been done regarding audiences and access, whether through translation, sign language, or physical access?

SR: We’ve always said that M+ is more than just a building, and not having a building until now really established an experimental and open-ended approach. Inside the institution, we embody diversity as a group of people with many languages and identities. We absorb the story of immigration and multiple homes as a fact and also think about here, there, and elsewhere as physical, temporal, and material. Our great opportunity is that we’ve been constructing a museum physically and building a museum as an idea at the same time. And we’ve done that as a team, through talking about audio description, subtitles, languages, signing, and tactility, which all sits in tandem with our thinking about the sustainability of the institution, how we understand the work we do, and how to ensure our research is expressed across these domains.

DC: Of course, we won’t get everything right when it comes to accessibility. I think this can only be improved by having people come through and give us feedback so we can learn from our mistakes. I also think about accessibility and inclusivity in terms of the range of content we provide and the psychological and cultural barriers that the general public can feel about the museum until it becomes their museum. One benefit from having this period of gestation is that we’ve been practicing ways of bringing content to people – through the website and even by literally moving content physically around the city. Then there is the LED facade, which we half-joke about, because if you don’t plan on visiting the museum, you’ll see it anyway! That’s another kind of access point.

Do you have any personal highlights at the museum?

SR: The museum is a really concentrated, distilled, and thoughtful response to what visual culture is and what we need to do at this time and place. I wouldn’t say there’s a single highlight, I think it’s the whole thing. It not all going to be perfect, that’s not the aim. It’s about being excited about something that has come into being in the cultural space, because I don’t know when we’ll see an institution like this born again in the world, at least for a while. We’ve had such difficult times – economic crisis, the social impacts of the pandemic – there are so many things to think about, digest, and reflect on.

DC: This is stating the obvious, but what’s been really amazing is to see all of the exhibitions, projects, and installations that we have been working on going up in a building that is an artwork in itself. It expresses itself in such a rich visual and material way. It has incredible sight lines that are constantly changing. That’s really a highlight – the physical experience.

Stephanie Bailey is a writer and editor from Hong Kong. 

Captions from top to bottom: 1. M+, Hong Kong. Photo by Virgile Simon Bertrand. © Virgile Simon Bertrand. Courtesy of Herzog & de Meuron. 2 (desktop). The Grand Stair, M+, Hong Kong. Photo by Kevin Mak. © Kevin Mak. Courtesy of Herzog & de Meuron. 2 (mobile). The Main Hall, M+, Hong Kong. Photo by Virgile Simon Bertrand. © Virgile Simon Bertrand. Courtesy of Herzog & de Meuron. 3. Antony Gormley, Asian Field, 2003. M+, Hong Kong. Museum purchase and gift of anonymous Hong Kong donor, 2015. Photo by Lok Cheng and Dan Leung for M+. © Antony Gormley. 4. The Atrium, 2/F, M+, Hong Kong. Photo by Virgile Simon Bertrand. © Virgile Simon Bertrand. Courtesy of Herzog & de Meuron. 4 (desktop). Tong Yang-Tze, Spirited, like a far-journeying steed; floating like a duck on water, 2002. © Tong Yang-Tze. 4 (mobile). MAD Architects, Postcard of New York, Superstar: A Mobile China Town, 2008. M+, Hong Kong. © MAD Architects. 5. M+, Hong Kong. Photo by Kevin Mak. © Kevin Mak. Courtesy of Herzog & de Meuron.