Hong Kong’s M+ Museum is now set to open its gates for visitors after years-long construction and several delays on November 12. Hong Kong residents will be able to visit the museum for free during its first year.
The museum’s first exhibition will be “Hong Kong: Here and Beyond,” a wide-ranging survey exploring various factors that have shaped the city over the years. Another show will showcase works given to the museum by Uli Sigg, who has emerged as one of the most important collectors of Chinese contemporary art worldwide.
The M+ museum has an area of 700000 square feet and will be one of the biggest museums in Hong Kong. The museum will showcase the collection of significant figures like Sigg, William, and Lavina Lim, Hallam Chow, and others.
A sense of uncertainty has loomed over the Herzog & de Meuron–designed museum since even before plans were first announced for an expected opening in 2017. Lars Nittve, the museum’s first director, left two years before that, in 2015. Suhanya Raffel replaced him in 2016. The museum fired its main contractor in 2018 and parted with its chief executive last year.
There have also been doubts about whether M+ will be able to exhibit art that is critical of the Chinese government, despite assertions from Raffel that it could do so. Over the past year, M+ has faced pushback from a number of figures, most notably artist Ai Weiwei. Earlier this year, M+ made the decision not to show Ai’s 1997 photograph Study of Perspective: Tian’anmen, in which the artist sticks up his middle finger at the site where armed troops fired at students protesting the Chinese government in 1989. The Ai work is part of the Sigg donation, and the museum said it would not exhibit the work after Carrie Lam, the chief executive of Hong Kong, promised to uphold a national security law.
On Wednesday, as M+ announced plans to open in November, it was reported that an image of Study of Perspective: Tian’anmen had been deleted from the museum’s website. In a statement, a museum spokesperson said that M+ was “reviewing the treatment of certain images of works having regard to the advice obtained from relevant authorities.”