All posts tagged: M+

Trevor Yeung 楊沛鏗

Courtyard of Attachments /M+ /Jun 14 – Oct 12, 2025 /Caroline Ha Thuc / Courtyard of Attachments, Trevor Yeung’s exhibition at M+, constitutes the Hong Kong iteration of the artist’s presentation for the 2025 Venice Biennale. Distributed across three rooms, one of which is devoted to video documentation, the exhibition has been reconfigured to suit the institutional context of the museum. The original installation featured four site-specific works that incorporated two distinct bodies of water: seawater outdoors and freshwater sourced from the Venice canal indoors. Central to the project is the notion of relationships explored through absence, mostly articulated through the presentation of 74 uninhabited fish tanks. At M+, this absence is intensified: not only are the fish missing but the water itself has also been removed. The exhibition thus distances visitors even further from the living ecosystems that once animated the installation. Consequently, issues such as water quality, ecological interdependence and human-aquatic relationships are displaced. Instead, questions of care and attachment are replaced by an encounter with their impossibility. The exhibition ultimately stages a …

Danh Võ In Situ: Akari by Noguchi 傅丹創意現場：野口勇的「光」

Published by Aaina Bhargava

There is a common cultural trope that in order to be a great artist one must struggle, undergo hardships and/or suffer from heartbreak. For artist Danh Võ, this is “fucking romanticised bourgeois bullshit. It’s coming from a privileged perspective.” Võ is here to shift established perspectives and ask what it means to make great art – a question that he and his classmates found themselves constantly asking while at art school in Denmark. “I was lumped into a fixed idea of what art could be,” says the Vietnamese-born Danish artist, who is now based in Berlin. “Denmark is so privileged: you get money when you study; you have all the resources. The art academy was great, as were the people you met there. But we were all trying to think differently and figure out: how do we make good art?” After making what he describes as “horrible paintings” as a student, Võ took a break and, in unconsciously trying to erase everything learned about what art could be, he found “a liberty, to work in …

A reminder of I.M. Pei’s Bank of China Tower, …

Published by John Batten

… steel scaffolding and tape, on the street, Shek Tong Tsui, Hong Kong, 27 May 2024 / The large retrospective exhibition devoted to the Chinese-American architect IM Pei (1917-2019) organised by Hong Kong’s M+ museum motivated me to look again at his Bank of China Tower in Central. Built on the site of Murray House, the former officers’ quarters of the British Army at Murray Barracks, its location, surrounded by major roads and on a sloping site, was described at the time of construction as “difficult”. If there were initial spatial restrictions, these are not obvious now. The tower has good ground-level pedestrian access and an imposing presence, with an architectural height of 315 metres; together with its two distinctive antenna masts, the building’s total height is 367 metres. The tower’s height impressively overwhelms the tight site and reaches upwards to overshadow lower adjacent buildings. Working with long-time structural engineering collaborator Leslie E Robertson (1928-2021), IM Pei developed the building’s form from four steel corner columns, onto which its weight transfers from its distinctive triangular/diamond framework. …

Family having cake and coffee, overlooking a misty Victoria Harbour, from Rooftop Garden, M+, West Kowloon, Hong Kong, 12 February 2023.

Published by John Batten

After allowing free entry for the first year of its operation, M+ – Hong Kong’s new international museum – recently introduced admission charges. The museum has however maintained free access to the cinema and its outdoor areas, including the third floor rooftop garden. Positioned alongside the city’s West Kowloon harbourfront where this photograph was taken, the museum’s south elevation has uninterrupted views towards Hong Kong island and Lantau island. Recently installed moveable seating now allows visitors to flexibly find the best view and follow the sun in winter and shade in summer. The north section of the rooftop garden with views over the adjacent Palace Museum, the West Kowloon ship mooring area, Stonecutters Island and the Kowloon hills, has a wonderfully interactive installation of ‘Playscape’ sculpture by the American-Japanese artist Isamu Noguchi. Particularly loved by children and as a location for wedding photos, the sculpture can be touched and climbed on. This fundamental change in entry policy has never been openly debated. During its first year of free entry, the museum saw record numbers of visitors. Charging admission will undoubtedly impact visits made by …

M+ Matters: Conversations on Women, Architecture, and the City

Published by Artomity Magazine

M+ Matters: Conversations on Women, Architecture, and the CityOrganised with the University of Hong Kong Faculty of ArchitectureNovember 23, 2019 Miller Theatre, Asia Society Hong Kong Center9 Justice DriveAdmiraltyHong Kong #MplusMatters 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. The series of dialogues brings together historians, editors, and educators to probe issues related to values and approaches in the practices of women architects between the 1950s and the 1980s—as well as the visibility of these practices. Conversations begin with a focus on Minnette de Silva (1918–1998), a pioneering woman architect in Sri Lanka; and Wang Chiu-hwa (born 1925), an architect known for her designs of libraries in Taiwan, who made a generous …

M+ presents Five Artists: Sites Encountered

Published by Artomity Magazine

Jun 7 – Oct 20, 2019Lara Almarcegui, May Fung, Lee Bul, Ana Mendieta, Charlotte PosenenskeM+ Pavilion, Art Park, West Kowloon Cultural District Tracking notions of site across multiple historical moments and artistic languages, the exhibited works include poetic expressions of the body, intense investigations into the built environment, and in one case, a direct response to the M+ site. Together, these multifaceted works display powerful connections between art and its surroundings—be they the natural environment, architectural space, urban contexts, or discursive frameworks—prompting us to rethink our relationships to place and sense of belonging in the world. A specially commissioned project by Lara Almarcegui presents a rigorous breakdown of the materials involved in the construction of the M+ building, offering a systematic expression of the transformations currently taking place at the museum’s site. With over twenty years of experience in investigating land and urban space, the artist fuses art-making with her research strategies, reflecting on unseen connections between what lies in the earth and the buildings that surround us. Ana Mendieta, a pioneering performance artist celebrated around the …

Miao Ying’s ‘Hardcore Digital Detox’, the first work in M+’s series of digital commissions

Published by Artomity Magazine

http://www.stories.mplus.org.hk M+ presents Hardcore Digital Detox, a work by Shanghai- and New York–based artist Miao Ying, commissioned expressly for the M+ Stories online platform. It explores the restricted Chinese internet—popularly known as the ‘Chinternet’—and is a ‘strategic lifestyle advice tool’ with the seemingly illogical premise of offering an online retreat from the digital world. This #spiritualretreatinchinternet parodies the widespread commodification of ‘wellness’ in Western societies, as well as the growing demand among affluent consumers for post-materialist experiences rooted in authenticity and nature—the kind that make for perfect Instagram posts. Miao considers herself a dual citizen of the Chinternet and the World Wide Web, and Hardcore Digital Detox operates in these two territories simultaneously, pitting mainstream internet users against Chinese censors by playfully instructing users to set their virtual private network (VPN) to mainland China, where popular websites and apps like Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Netflix, eBay, WhatsApp, Vimeo, and Amazon are restricted. For Miao, the images and ideas that are blocked by the Great Firewall of China are akin to liu bai (negative space) in traditional Chinese ink painting, as …

M+ Matters | Keynote: Building Louvre Abu Dhabi

Published by Artomity Magazine

December 7, 2018, 6.30pm Jockey Club Hall, Asia Society Hong Kong Center (9 Justice Drive, Admiralty, Hong Kong) http://www.westkowloon.hk In this lecture organised by M+, Manuel Rabaté, Director of Louvre Abu Dhabi, discusses the building of this twenty-first-century encyclopedic museum as ‘a museum of experimentation, and a museum of meeting points’. Louvre Abu Dhabi opened in November 2017 following a decade of planning and construction. It is the result of a collegial effort between France and the United Arab Emirates to create a visionary museum that inherits the tradition of the French institution while 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 …

Noguchi for Danh Vo: Counterpoint

Published by Artomity Magazine

November 16, 2018 – April 22, 2019 M+ Pavilion, West Kowloon Cultural District http://www.mplus.org.hk/counterpoint M+, Hong Kong’s new museum of 20th- and 21st-century visual culture in the West Kowloon Cultural District, presents Noguchi for Danh Vo: Counterpoint, to be held at the M+ Pavilion from November 16, 2018 to April 22, 2019. This exhibition is a dialogue between two artists: Japanese American artist Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988), who is a central figure in the history of modern art, design, and landscape architecture, and Vietnamese Danish artist Danh Vo (born 1975), an original voice in contemporary art practice. The exhibition articulates this conversation through a range of works by Noguchi that spans almost five decades, including drawings, industrial design objects, and sculptures in stone, metal, and other materials. Vo’s contribution to the exhibition consists not only of select examples of his practice produced between 2010 and 2018, but also of building a bridge between two institutions and two cities—M+ in Hong Kong and The Noguchi Museum in New York. The exhibition is structured as a counterpoint, a relationship …

In Search of Southeast Asia through the M+ Collections

Published by Artomity Magazine

In Search of Southeast Asia through the M+ Collections is the first exhibition to present how M+ is addressing the complex region of Southeast Asia in the building of its multidisciplinary collections. Encompassing visual art, design and architecture, and moving image works from, and about, Southeast Asia—including the nations of Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam—the exhibition highlights how M+ is developing a unique perspective on the region as a place that is defined by multiple narratives, histories, and identities. Featuring archival materials, architectural models, contemporary art installations, and moving image artworks, the exhibition illuminates the region’s historical and contemporary contexts as well as the flow of ideas across borders. Date: Now until 30 September 2018 Opening Hours: 11am–6pm Wednesday to Sunday and public holidays Venue: M+ Pavilion, West Kowloon Cultural District Free Admission Details: http://www.mplus.org.hk/insearchofsea Conjunction public talk: Powers at Play In conversations with M+ curators Pauline J. Yao (Lead Curator, Visual Art) and Shirley Surya (Associate Curator, Design and Architecture), the invited speakers will present how their practice …