M+ / Design Trust Research Fellowship

28. 5. 2020

The M+ / Design Trust Research Fellowship programme has supported original research projects investigating design and architecture in Hong Kong, the Greater Bay Area, and Asia. In addition to expanding the current body of knowledge in these areas, the findings from the fellowship will inform research on the existing collection, future acquisitions, and other programmes at M+.

The fellowships engage in advanced research on historical or contemporary topic related to architecture, graphic design, industrial design, and urbanism or cross-disciplinary developments, taking into consideration the region’s cultural, social, economic, and political conditions as well as its international and cross-cultural knowledge networks.

Design Trust would like to thank Lars Nittve, Aric Chen, Marisa Yiu and Alan Lo for establishing the programme in 2014. The fellowship programme has concluded with the public talks from Leah Hsiao and Flora Weil in February 2025. An online archive of the fellowship research will be launched in 2026.

 

List of Fellows (2015-2025):

  1. Hong Kong as an Archetype: Revisiting Modernist Ideas of the City and its Urban Forms by Ling Fan (2015)
  2. The Gongkai Galapagos by Joseph Grima (2016)
  3. 76 Countries and One Administrative Zone: Hong Kong in World Expos by Daniel Cooper and Juliana Kei (2016)
  4. Unbuilt Macau by Thomas Daniell (2017)
  5. Hong Kong Architecture in the Videogame Vernacular by Hugh Davies (2018)
  6. Making Space for Play: From Shek Lei Playground to Twentieth-Century Hong Kong Playscapes by Fan Lok Yi and Sampson Wong (2018)
  7. Brutalism and its Cultural Implications in Hong Kong and China by Oliver Elser (2019)
  8. Excavating the Layers Behind the Border Posts Architectures in Indonesia: Identity Construction, Exclusion-Inclusion and a Sense of Belonging by Yasmin Tri Aryani (2019)
  9. Auto Pilot Cities. Computational Urbanism in Southeast Asia by Mark Wasiuta and Farzin Lotfi-Jam (2020)
  10. Chinese Alternative Design by Jason Lau (2020)
  11. Miniature as Method: Learning from Hong Kong Urban Design in Micro-scale by Emily Verla Bovino (2021)
  12. China and the Cosmotechnics of Fashion by Anouchka van Drie (2021)
  13. How to translate ‘Design’?: The Dissemination of Design Education and Culture from Asia to the Greater Bay Area, 1970s-1990s by Leah Hsiao (2023)
  14. Design in Rising Winds by Flora Weil (2023)

About M+

M+ is a museum dedicated to collecting, exhibiting, and interpreting visual art, design and architecture, moving image, and Hong Kong visual culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District, we are building one of the largest museums of modern and contemporary visual culture in the world, with a bold ambition to establish ourselves as one of the world’s leading cultural institutions. Our aim is to create a new kind of museum that reflects our unique time and place, a museum that builds on Hong Kong’s historic balance of the local and the international to define a distinctive and innovative voice for Asia’s twenty-first century.