M+ opens its doors on November 12th 2021

M+, Asia’s first global museum of contemporary visual culture in the West Kowloon Cultural District of Hong Kong, opens to the public on 12 November 2021, unveiling the opening displays of its pre-eminent collections of twentieth- and twenty-first-century visual art, design and architecture, and moving image from Hong Kong, Greater China, Asia, and beyond.

Since 2014, building upon M+ / Design Trust Research Fellowship collaborative programmes, in its seventh year in 2021, we are pleased to share the exciting news on its official opening. Designed by a global team of the world-renowned architecture practice Herzog & de Meuron in partnership with TFP Farrells and Arup, the 65,000-square-metre M+ building is among Hong Kong’s most iconic landmarks, both monumental in its architectural form and radically open in its position in the urban landscape.

The museum’s opening displays include six thematic exhibitions including: Hong Kong: Here and Beyond, M+ Sigg Collection, Things, Spaces, Interactions, Individuals, Networks, Expressions, Antony Gormley: Asian Field and The Dream of the Museum. 2018 M+ / Design Trust Research Fellow Hugh Davies’s video games research is also presented at the M+ opening exhibition “Hong Kong: Here and Beyond” at Main Hall Gallery, focusing on the visual culture of our city from the 1960s to now. Surveying Hong Kong’s representation in a multiplicity of video game experiences over the past thirty years, Hugh Davies explores the city in its varying incarnations, unearthing the correspondences between the actual and the virtual, and consider it through different overlapping areas of design disciplines. His installation invites the audience to experience Hong Kong through video game streetscapes from the 1980s to now. Hugh Davies is an interdisciplinary artist, educator and investigator, examines Hong Kong’s character, architecture and urban design as represented in videogames.

Archigram’s works presented at the exhibition “Things, Spaces, Interactions” featuring more than 500 objects from Asia and beyond that have built societies, shaped identities, and imagined our future. As the Creative Director of Design Trust Gala event 2019, contributing to the theme “The Archigram City”, Archigram partners Sir Peter Cook and Dennis Crompton re-created some of the themes that the group generated through their Walking City, Plug-in City, Computer City, Layer City and Instant City – visionary ideas that have increasingly found their way into reality. The Archigram City carries on the Archigram Group’s dedication to the idea of creating domestic and public space through series of transformative, interactive and essential combinations of technology and human ingenuity, created the past event’s immersive architectural environment, adding positive physical and emotional impact that design and architecture should have on our city. 

More dynamic display spaces in M+ is now available for the public to explore and discover Hong Kong visual culture. Apart from being for direct circulation between G/F and 2/F, the Grand Stair is its own generous public topography—a place that can be freely-accessed for informal gathering off the street, or, completely blacked-out and closed off to transform into a flexible auditorium for lectures, screenings, and other events. With spectacular views of the harbour, the stair is where the city, the public, and visual culture coincide. Stay tuned for the upcoming M+/Design Trust Fellowship programmes in M+ symposium space in 2022.