M+ is the new museum for visual culture in Hong Kong, as part of West Kowloon Cultural District, focusing on 20th and 21st century art, design, architecture and moving image.
From day one, M+ is set to develop content from a Hong Kong perspective with a global vision. It is a project with a strong public service ethos, not primarily envisioned as a prestigious venture or a tourist project, but fundamentally as a museum for the more than seven million people living and working in Hong Kong, firmly rooted in the location and its unique culture.
While this goal is by no means unique compared to that of many museums around the world, the cultural ecology which M+ is part of has other traditions, histories and experiences than those that engendered today’s leading museums. By presenting its collection in innovative ways through rich and diverse exhibition and education programmes, the future M+ building (scheduled for completion at the end of 2017) will be the optimal meeting point for various parties with exceedingly disparate requirements, encouraging enhanced audience participation and dialogue between different forms of visual culture, and cultures of "looking". The building, therefore, for now and the foreseeable future, remains to be the museum’s main tool. Its symbolic significance is greater than ever especially with the cultural genres growing ever more fluid and mutant.
The collection at M+ is focused on 20th-21st century visual culture, encompassing the disciplines of visual art, design, architecture, and moving image from Hong Kong, China, and expanding to other regions of Asia and the rest of the world. It will form the "backbone" of the museum, constantly in dialogue with the museum's temporary exhibitions and educational activities. In addition to providing a historical reference to the contemporary, the collection will also be re-interpreted, re-evaluated and re-written by its programmes.
The ambition of M+ does not merely lie in building a collection that reflects its time and place. Any visitor that encounters the M+ collection a decade from now should experience that he or she is in Hong Kong, in China and in Asia, but also in the world. It is therefore our ultimate goal to build a collection that looks at the world from a Hong Kong perspective, in which global developments in visual culture will be filtered through the lens of what is relevant to Hong Kong's current place in the world.
The M+ collection strategy will be shaped by priorities consisting of three strategic areas of concern relating to chronology, geography and various fields of focus amidst the complexity of visual culture.
As a museum focusing on contemporary visual culture, the composition of the collection must be flexible in its representation of "time", which will be determined by the respective work and discipline, as well as the preferred logic of presentation. Having the collecting priorities shaped by a perspective alert to emerging developments in cultural production, the acquisitions – historic or contemporary – must be relevant to current trends, discussions and research in contemporary culture, to meet the goal of establishing a new type of cultural institution that echoes the hybridity, contemporaneity and urgency of its place.The collection can be viewed as a number of concentric circles which in essence is a materialisation of the corresponding relationships between different geographical zones in a globalised world.The core of the collection will be visual culture from Hong Kong, represented by seminal works from the 20th and 21st century. The collection will feature works by local masters and emerging talents that would reflect developments of decisive historical, emergent moment and the expansive terms of art-making today. Expanding immediately from this focal point will be a rich and extensive collection of visual culture from China, which will further extend to the rest of the world, particularly other parts of Asia. The collection would reflect the historical implications of local, regional and global networks on visual-cultural production that will bring about a more nuanced understanding of cultural hybridities across Asia and their relationships to the rest of the world.
In recent years, many of the most interesting elements or works in visual culture have emerged in the thresholds between the different fields of Visual Art, Moving Image, Design and Architecture. While this trend of interdisciplinary approach is visible in many parts of the world, it is made more apparent by the amplification of Asia's, and especially Hong Kong's fluid creative climate, where collaborations and crossovers between different professions and fields have become the norm in many practices.
These movements have restructured preconceived, largely Euro-American, understanding of any rigid boundary between Visual Art and other aspects of visual culture. Many artistic productions today could be accounted and registered under a variety of categories. The collection should reflect the significance of the vital exchange within these interdisciplinary models. M+ will deploy a more expansive and global concept of "art", coupling it with a degree of flexibility afforded by the notion of "interdisciplinarity" as a starting point, to develop a collection presentation that can be a portal through which various aspects of visual culture may be explored, both autonomously and collectively, while retaining the specificities and histories of each genre or type of practice.
The recently donated Sigg Collection has formed a major part of M+ recent acquisitions. Comprising major works by artists from the late 1970s to the present, the Sigg Collection is recognised as the largest, most comprehensive and important collection in the world of Chinese contemporary art. Fitting in with the second tier of geographical priorities in our collecting strategies, it will function as one of the many "seeds" in developing the future collection of M+ for the construction of multiple narratives in documenting 20th-21st visual culture in the region.
M+ will carry on expanding its collection to fulfill its goals and values, with the aim to develop a collection that will encompass Hong Kong visual culture at its core, while expanding its links to the rest of the world. M+ plans to present its collection and on-going acquisition on an online platform in the near future.
M+ views the educational component as one of the core means for the museum to be a gathering place for ideas and dialogues. M+ aspires to engage various audience groups – from children and families, community groups, students and teachers, to practitioners of the fields – by being a key resource centre while offering a wide range of events as platforms for sharing and learning. The M+ team will work closely with artists, educators and other content partners to design a range of projects, activities and learning opportunities that will deepen and enhance audience understanding, appreciation and experience of visual culture.In 2012, M+ launched a 10-week learning programme to offer aspiring museum practitioners a chance to gain working experience within the field.
The future building of M+ is scheduled for completion at the end of 2017. The physical design of its 60,000-square-metre building (of which approximately 20,000 sqm will consist of exhibition space) will be shaped around the ideas, vision and, eventually, contents formulated now and in the coming years through the curatorial team and programmes such as “M+ Bamboo Theatre Exhibition, “Mobile M+: Yau Ma Tei” and “Mobile M+: Song Dong’s 32 Calendars”. The design of the museum building will allow for a distinct and simultaneous display of art, design, architecture, video and installations. The design competition for M+ has been launched in September, 2012 and the final selection will be announced in mid-2013. In the run up to the building's completion, WKCDA will also be commissioning a series of art pavilions in the park, with the first to be completed at the end of 2014.
(photo by West Kowloon Cultural District Authority)
