M+ invites Danh Vo (Danish, born Vietnam, 1975) to work on a long-term project in the museum’s Found Space, a dramatic concrete atrium that lies at the heart of the building. Vo’s art uses everyday and found materials that carry specific histories and symbolic references, while often integrating the work of other artists, family members, and friends. For this project, Vo has responded with a proposal to transform the experience of the site and the way in which it is programmed.

Over the next few years, Vo will work within M+, drawing on the skills of its various teams to reimagine the institution’s potentials and exhibition-making practices. Vo will use the space in organic and sustainable ways, reimagining it as a welcoming social zone that is also a stage for different programmes. The space will incorporate changing displays and events that build on the museum’s exploration of global conceptual art and design from an Asian perspective, as in previous projects the artist has participated in, such as Noguchi for Danh Vo: Counterpoint (2018) and The Dream of the Museum (2021).

A.A.Murakami (est. 2011) is a Tokyo- and London-based artist duo formed by Alexander Groves (b. 1983) and Azusa Murakami (b. 1984). Their multidisciplinary practice straddles the spheres of sculpture, installation, cinema, and digital art, creating experiences that augment their science-based inquiries with moments of daring and spectacle.

The exhibition will feature two interlinked immersive installations which offer an otherworldly experience: one traces the journeys of physical fog rings travelling into the digital realm, and the other reveals an environment of floating bubble clouds. With transient materials and the innovative application of custom-built technology, these two large-scale installations inspire visitors to question philosophical ideas about the nature of reality, artifice, and the digital lives that we increasingly embody within today's contemporary landscape. The presentation at M+ further develops the duo’s pioneering concept of ‘Ephemeral Tech’, in which innovative technological research is used to reimagine primordial origins and to speculate possible future scenarios.

M+ will present Sonic Blossom, a celebrated performative installation by LEE Mingwei (b. 1964), in the Focus Gallery. Sonic Blossom is a live performance which features trained opera singers approaching a visitor in the museum galleries to offer the gift of song. It is inspired by the artist's experience of caring for his mother during her recovery from surgery, when they both took solace in listening to Franz Schubert's Lieder. With five chosen Lieder and a group of Hong Kong-based classical singers, Sonic Blossom transforms these songs into an extraordinary offering that elicits spontaneous moments of joy, sadness, and connection. Taiwan-born LEE Mingwei is an internationally recognised artist with a pioneering practice that foregrounds experience and artistic participation. Educated in Taiwan and the United States, LEE is part of a generation of artists who began to incorporate participatory elements into their art in the 1990s. LEE's work, however, has always taken a different approach, transcending cultural and political boundaries to cut to the core of the human experience and reveal our desire for connectedness.

Currently on view, Movana Chen: Knitting Conversations is a monumental installation by artist Movana Chen reflecting on female labour, personal and shared memories, material transformation, and time. Originally conceived as a participatory work, Knitting Conversations was first exhibited in 2013 where audience members were invited to contribute to the work by bringing along a treasured book to shred into yarn, as the artist and participants knitted and conversed. This August, Movana Chen invites visitors to participate and exchange personal stories under the installation, experiencing a unique connection with others.

Artist Movana Chen will be facilitating the experience at M+ on designated weekends on 17, and 18 August, 14:00–17:30.

The event is free for valid exhibition ticket holders. Please retain a copy of your ticket to facilitate your entry to the gallery. Please see 'Get Tickets' for details. Participants are invited to bring a map that can be shredded to participate in the public workshop.

The first major retrospective of Ieoh Ming Pei (1917–2019), I. M. Pei: Life is Architecture properly appraises for the first time the work of one of the greatest architects of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Pei’s high-profile projects were realised over seven decades with an exceptionally wide geographic reach, including the National Gallery of Art East Building in Washington, D.C., modernisation of the Grand Louvre in Paris, Bank of China Tower in Hong Kong, and Museum of Islamic Art in Doha. These iconic landmarks solidified Pei’s position in architectural history and popular culture. His life and work weave together a tapestry of power dynamics, geopolitical complexities, cultural traditions, and the character of cities around the world, and his transcultural vision laid a foundation for the contemporary world.

The exhibition takes an expanded and closer look at Pei’s practice through six themes representing areas of focus and approaches throughout his career: ‘Transcultural Foundations’, ‘Real Estate and Urban Redevelopment’, ‘Art and Civic Form’, ‘Material and Structural Innovation’, ‘Power, Politics, and Patronage’, and ‘Regenerating Cultural and Historical Archetypes’. The themes place Pei’s practice in close dialogue with social, cultural, and biographical trajectories that show architecture and life to be inseparable.  The exhibition features a rich selection of drawings, sketches, videos, models, photographs, and other archival documentation, many of which will be on view for the first time.

Presented as part of a new series of focused monographic exhibitions on historically important figures and moments, Henry Steiner: The Art of Graphic Communication features the work of the father of graphic design in Hong Kong. The exhibition celebrates Henry Steiner's (b. 1934) influential graphic language with a selection of some of his most iconic projects tracing the city’s development from the 1960s onwards.

Born in Austria in 1934, Henry Steiner immigrated to the United States where he trained at Yale University under the renowned American graphic designer Paul Rand, learning the art of storytelling through images. After moving to Hong Kong in 1961, he found the city vibrant with a complex culture, a place on the cusp of transformation into an international centre for manufacturing, trade, finance, leisure, and tourism. Organised into two sections, this exhibition will first trace Steiner’s early years and influences that underpin his distinctive style. It will then take visitors through Steiner’s definitive designs, from large infrastructural and industry projects that marked the development of the city to those reflecting Hong Kong’s growth as a destination for travel and leisure. By showing Steiner’s practice through Hong Kong’s flourishing decades, the exhibition elaborates the significance of graphic design in Hong Kong’s distinctive visual culture.

Noir & Blanc: A Story of Photography is M+’s first exhibition on photography, co-presented with the French May Arts Festival and in collaboration with the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF). This thematic exhibition examines black-and-white photography as a time-honoured medium of art by presenting more than 250 important photographs from BnF’s collection, complemented by over thirty photographs from the M+ Collections. With works dated from 1915 to 2019 in three thematic sections—‘Aiming for Contrast’, ‘Light and Shadow’, and ‘Colour Chart’—the exhibition explores the enduring aesthetics of black-and-white photography and offers different perspectives to understand black-and-white image-making over the course of more than a century.

Venue address: Main Hall Gallery, M+

Experience the museum in a whole new way! Join us for a Friday night where dynamic lighting, energetic music, exciting creative activities, and food and drinks take over. Unwind from the stresses of everyday life and connect with friends and like-minded people.

When you picture Hong Kong after-hours, what gives the city its distinct flair? For the first edition in March, M+ at Night celebrates the ‘Hong Kong Street Culture’. On 1 March 2024, M+ invites the creative collective Yeti Out and its co-founder Arthur Bray to programme a wide range of activities for you to explore the streets and alleys of the city through mediums including sound, graphics, and typography. Imagine the interactions between people and their surroundings and discover how their everyday lives shapes the diverse street culture.

Price: HKD 180

M+ Members and Patrons can attend for free.

"Knitting Conversations" is a monumental installation by Hong Kong artist Movana Chen (b. 1974) reflecting on female labour, personal and shared memories, material transformation, and time. Originally conceived as a participatory work, Knitting Conversations was first exhibited in 2013 where audience members were invited to contribute to the work by bringing along a treasured book. Books and paper have been used for millennia to transmit knowledge and experiences. Chen transforms books by shredding the books’ pages, abstracting and decontextualising their content, to turn them into ‘yarn’, a medium traditionally for craft. Through her conversations with collaborators while knitting the work, the artist makes new and intimate connections that transcend language, politics, culture, and gender. Her process creates safe and nurturing situations where the focus is on spending time together, sharing experiences, emotions, and ideas, and the wonder of learning something new and unexpected. Following the end of her 2013 exhibition, Knitting Conversationscontinued to grow through the collaboration of many individuals donating their books and time to the work across many different locations, including Amsterdam, Bangkok, Berlin, Krasnoyarsk, Kuala Lumpur, Lhasa, London, Melbourne, Moscow, Paris, Philadelphia, Seoul, Shanghai, Tokyo, and Toronto. This culminated in an exhibition in Los Angeles in 2017, where the work was finished. This will be the first time that the completed work is shown in Hong Kong.

Shanshui: Echoes and Signals is a thematic exhibition with works drawn from the M+ Collections to explore the complex connections between landscape and humanity in our post-industrial and increasingly virtual world. Shanshui, the Chinese literally meaning ‘mountain and water’ and commonly translated as ‘landscape’, is a cultural legacy integral to Chinese philosophical thinking and poetic imagination and has motivated a millennium-long tradition of ink painting across East Asia. Attuned to the interplay and resonance between stillness and motion, as well as space and time, shanshui offers a powerful framework for understanding humankind’s relationship to nature.

Venue address: South Gallery, M+

Ay-O: Hong Hong Hong highlights the practice of Japanese artist Ay-O, widely known as the ‘rainbow artist’, who has explored the universal motif of the rainbow in ever-expanding constellations of forms, ideas, and moods, driven by his unflagging humour, curiosity, and imagination. Ay-O developed his distinct visual language in the immediate aftermath of World War II and later in the milieu of the international movement of Fluxus, centred in New York City in the 1960s. These experiences shaped his belief that art should be as widely accessible as possible. From this anti-elitist philosophy emerged his signature rainbow patterns, which he has been applying and adapting to numerous canvases, sculptures, and environments over the last six decades. 

Inaugurating the new M+’s ‘Pao-Watari Exhibition Series’ of monographic exhibitions on significant figures and moments in the histories of art and visual culture of Asia, Ay-O: Hong Hong Hong features Ay-O’s works from the 1950s to the 2000s, complemented by a selection of Fluxus works by the artist and his fellow compatriots.

Venue address: Cissy Pui-Lai Pao and Shinichiro Watari Galleries, M+

Sigg Prize 2023 will showcase the works of six shortlisted artists for the award. Open to artists born or working in the Greater China region, the award recognises important artistic practices in the region and aims to highlight and promote diverse works on an international scale. This exhibition is the second edition of the prize, which will present a wide range of mediums, including painting, sculpture, video, and installation. Through the works, the artists demonstrate their unique visions and approaches to current urgent contemporary issues, fostering the cultural dialogues emerging from the region in response to a critical transitional period of the world.

The six shortlisted artists are Jes Fan (b. 1990, lives and works in New York); Miao Ying (b. 1985, lives and works in New York); Wang Tuo (b. 1984, lives and works in Beijing); Xie Nanxing (b. 1970, lives and works in Beijing and Chengdu); Trevor Yeung (b. 1988, lives and works in Hong Kong); and Yu Ji (b. 1985, lives and works in Berlin).

Location: Main Hall Gallery, M+

M+ Sigg Collection: Another Story  takes a visual approach to examine the styles and practices of contemporary Chinese art from the 1990s to the present. Distinct from the socio-political interpretative framework or the chronological narrative of the inaugural exhibition of the M+ Sigg Collection—From Revolution to Globalisation, Another Story  surveys how artists reconsider their cultural identities and express their uncertain state of being during China's rapid modernisation in the 1990s. The exhibition brings together a multitude of works that exhibit qualities of overflowing visuals, ambiguous meanings, obsessions with transiency, and traditional interpretation. Another Story is the second of three planned exhibitions of the M+ Sigg Collection. It offers a different perspective on understanding contemporary Chinese art and foregrounds its unique visual language through the lens of artists who strive for self-presence.

Location: Sigg Galleries, M+

Meet the icon who transformed the landscape of arts, fashion, and popular culture in China from the 1980s to 2000s.

Song Huai-Kuei (1937–2006), widely known during her lifetime as Madame Song, was a legend in the spheres of Chinese art, film, music, and fashion during the 1980s and 1990s. With her husband, Bulgarian fibre artist Maryn Varbanov (1932–1989), Song helped foster a forward-looking creative scene and cultivated a modern, international lifestyle in China at a time when the country was largely isolated from the rest of the world for much of the Cold War.

This upcoming Special Exhibition brings to light Madame Song’s fascinating multiple identities and professional pursuits. It will chronicle her life and practice from the 1950s to the early 2000s and unveil Song’s thus-far overlooked and underestimated influence on China's transformation into the cosmopolitan and culturally diverse society it is today.

Hong Kong artist Angela Su’s exhibition representing Hong Kong at the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia will be showcased at M+ with an adapted and site-responsive presentation. This upcoming exhibition will stage the artist’s speculative research about Lauren O, a legendary levitator who played an instrumental role in the 1960s anti-war movement in the United States. Featuring a collection of Lauren O’s notes and study models, the exhibition will illustrate her obsession with transformation and levitation.

Angela Su’s works investigate the perception and imagery of the body through processes of metamorphosis, hybridity, and transformation. Her research-based projects materialise into drawing, video, hair embroidery, and performative and installation works, which explore the interrelations between our state of being and the advancement of technology. Central to these projects are video essays and texts that weave together fact and fiction, and reality and fantasy. With a focus on the history of medical science, her works question dominant biomedical discourse and contemplate the impact of technology on the past, present, and future.

The exhibition is co-organized by M+ and Hong Kong Arts Development Council.

Discover this visionary artist’s groundbreaking career and witness the power of art to connect and heal.

Yayoi Kusama emerged as a global cultural icon for the twenty-first century by pursuing her uncompromising avant-garde vision. Over the past seven decades, she honed a singular personal aesthetic and core philosophy of life. Kusama’s work captivates millions by offering glimpses of boundless space and reflections on natural cycles of regeneration. Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Nownarrates the story of this artist’s life and work, foregrounding her longing for interconnection and the profound questions about existence that drive her creative explorations.

Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now is the largest retrospective of the artist in Asia outside Japan. Featuring more than 200 works, including paintings, drawings, sculptures, installations, and archival material, this exhibition surveys Kusama’s career from the earliest drawings she made as a teenager during World War II to her most recent immersive art pieces. Organised chronologically and thematically, the retrospective guides visitors through Kusama’s career-long creative pouring divided into major themes: Infinity, Accumulation, Radical Connectivity, Biocosmic​, Death, and Force of Life.

Photo by Yusuke Miyazaki. Courtesy of Ota Fine Arts, Victoria Miro, and David Zwirner. © YAYOI KUSAMA

West Gallery, The Studio, Main Hall, Lightwell, Found Space

In Search of Vanished Blood (2012/22) is a commission for the M+ Facade by moving image artist Nalini Malani.

Comprising live-action performance, animation, drawing, painting, and found footage, this silent eight-and-a-half-minute video is tailored for display on the M+ Facade in a bold visual dialogue with Hong Kong’s dynamic skyline. Complementing Nalini Malani: Vision in Motion, the inaugural exhibition in the Studio at M+, In Search of Vanished Blood continues Malani’s longstanding artistic investigation into the effects of war, violence, and the repression of women. The enigmatic video mingles coded images from Greek and Hindu mythology with personal and real-world references, layering architectural forms, cloudy skies, world maps, human faces, and a gigantic prostrate female figure that emerge from shadows and darkness.

In Search of Vanished Blood will be displayed daily on the M+ Facade from Friday, 5 August 2022 until Sunday, 2 October 2022, from 19:00 to 21:10. The work will be presented from 19:00 to 21:10 during the weekends only from Saturday, 8 October 2022 to Sunday, 30 October 2022.

M+, Asia’s first global museum of contemporary visual culture in the West Kowloon Cultural District in Hong Kong, is delighted to announce a brand-new moving image work by pioneering Hong Kong artist Ellen Pau, co-commissioned with Art Basel. The work, titled The Shape of Light, will be shown on the M+ Facade from Friday, 20 May 2022 until Sunday, 19 June 2022 at 7 to 9pm daily. The project marks the first major collaborative commission for the M+ Facade since M+’s opening in November 2021.

Supported by UBS, Lead Partner of Art Basel, The Shape of Light is a site-specific moving image work made specially for the M+ Facade. Using digitally animated special effects, the video explores the possibilities of the immaterial and the material, transforming light into digital objects. Featuring a popular sutra in Mahayana Buddhism, The Heart Sutra, here expressed through sign language, the ritualistic video meditates on the concept ‘form is emptiness, emptiness is form’. Natural phenomena like fire, water, and light are all rendered in awe-inspiring computer-generated animation.

M+ and Art Basel will present a series of public programmes, including a live durational performance, an artist talk, and an online screening following the debut of The Shape of Light.

Complementing the display of The Shape of Light on M+ Facade, M+ and Art Basel will also present a series of free online and offline events, making the artwork more accessible to the public.

The Shape of Light live performance by Ellen Pau, in collaboration with Amy Chan (lighting designer), Quinn Wong (producer/livecoder), and Paul Yip (sound artist), will offer a space of healing, using sound, light, and digital objects. The drop-in performance will run from 5 to 8pm on Friday, 27 May 2022 at The Forum, M+.

Ellen Pau will be in dialogue with Ulanda Blair about her new work, The Shape of Light at a talk and screening. Attendees will here have the rare opportunity to experience some of Pau’s past works made between 1988 and 2015. The talk will take place from 2 to 3:30pm on Saturday, 28 May 2022 at the M+ Grand Stair, M+.

A four-day online screening from Sunday, 29 May to Wednesday, 1 June 2022 will enable local and international audiences to view a collection of Ellen Pau’s pioneering videos and installations made between 1988 and 2015. Each video will include an audio commentary by Pau, describing the ideas and inspiration behind her work.