About M+

M+

M+ is a museum of twentieth- and twenty-first-century visual culture in the West Kowloon Cultural District of Hong Kong, at 38 Museum Drive on the Victoria Harbour waterfront. Owned by the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority, it was conceived as a new kind of multidisciplinary institution — a museum "plus" — dedicated not only to visual art but also to design and architecture and to the moving image, together with the thematic area of Hong Kong visual culture. From its opening it was intended to stand alongside institutions such as Tate Modern in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris in the breadth and importance of its collections, while telling its stories from a Hong Kong and Asian perspective. It describes itself as Asia's global museum of contemporary visual culture.

Origins and the Long Road to Opening

The idea of a world-class museum for Hong Kong was first announced in 1997, the year Hong Kong returned to Chinese rule, as part of the wider ambition to develop the West Kowloon Cultural District on reclaimed waterfront land. A long consultation process followed, and the concept that emerged was of a "museum plus": an institution that would reframe the global conversation about contemporary culture by treating art, design, architecture, film and video as parts of a single visual culture rather than as separate worlds. Building the collection began well before there was a building to put it in, and for years M+ operated through travelling and pop-up programmes, research and publishing while its permanent home was designed and constructed. The museum finally opened to the public on 12 November 2021, later than originally planned, after a development process marked by repeated postponements.

The Building by Herzog & de Meuron

An architectural competition for the museum drew six finalists, announced in 2012, and the winning design by the Swiss practice Herzog & de Meuron, working with TFP Farrells as local partner and Arup as engineering consultant, was announced in June 2013. Construction began in 2014 — some accounts date the start of building work to 2015 — and the building was completed in December 2020. The result is a structure of about 65,000 square metres in the form of an upside-down "T": a broad horizontal podium, lifted off the ground so that pedestrians can circulate underneath, carries the exhibition floors, while a slender tower above houses restaurants, lounges and gardens, together with offices, the Research Centre and a members' lounge. The podium cantilevers above the ground, and lightwells and skylights cut through the floor plates to connect the Main Hall at ground level with the spaces below. Behind the museum stands a separate Conservation and Storage Facility dedicated to preserving the collections.

Exhibition Spaces and the Harbour Facade

Inside, the museum provides about 17,200 square metres (17,000 square metres in the museum's own building statistics) of exhibition space across thirty-three galleries. Most galleries are on the second floor, branching out from a central atrium to the West Gallery, which is reserved for special exhibitions, and to the galleries holding the permanent collections. The building also contains three cinema houses, the Mediatheque, a Learning Hub with workshops and seminar rooms for students, families and visitors of all ages, and a Roof Garden facing Victoria Harbour. One unusual space is the Found Space, a vast atrium on the lowest level created around the tunnels of the Airport Express railway line that passes beneath the site. On the harbour side, an LED lighting display system is integrated into the tower facade, forming one of the world's largest such screens: it shows moving-image works and can be seen across Victoria Harbour from the West Kowloon promenade and Hong Kong Island, turning the building itself into an exhibition surface.

The M+ Collections

The M+ Collections focus on visual culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries across four areas: visual art, design and architecture, moving image, and Hong Kong visual culture. At opening the collections numbered more than 6,410 objects — 6,421 by the museum's 2021 count — and they have continued to grow; by the time of the museum's fifth anniversary its collection was reported at more than 9,000 works, drawn mainly from Hong Kong, mainland China and the rest of Asia. The design and architecture holdings include the archive of the British group Archigram, acquired in 2019, and works associated with architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe; among the design objects is a complete sushi bar by the Japanese designer Shiro Kuramata. Because the museum collects across media, a single visit can move from painting and sculpture to furniture, posters, architectural models, video and digital works.

The M+ Sigg Collection

The founding anchor of the collection is the M+ Sigg Collection, formed from the holdings of Uli Sigg, the Swiss businessman and former Swiss ambassador to China, who had been documenting the development of contemporary Chinese art since the early 1990s. The part-donation, part-purchase arrangement was secured in 2012 under the museum's then director Lars Nittve. It brought M+ some 1,463 works by 325 artists, valued at about HK$1.3 billion, including 26 works by Ai Weiwei, and it is regarded as one of the largest and most comprehensive collections of contemporary Chinese art in the world. Highlights were shown in Hong Kong in 2016, before the building existed, in the collection's first large-scale presentation in the city. At the museum's opening, the exhibition "M+ Sigg Collection: From Revolution to Globalisation", shown in the dedicated Sigg Galleries, offered a chronological survey of contemporary Chinese art from the 1970s through the 2000s.

Opening Exhibitions

When M+ opened on 12 November 2021, its opening displays consisted of six exhibitions drawn from the collections. Alongside the Sigg Collection survey, "Hong Kong: Here and Beyond" in the Main Hall Gallery traced the city's visual culture from the 1960s to the present in four chapters — Here, Identities, Places and Beyond. "Things, Spaces, Interactions" in the East Galleries explored international design and architecture over the previous seventy years and their relevance to everyday life, while "Individuals, Networks, Expressions" in the South Galleries told a narrative of post-war international visual art from the perspective of Asia. Tens of thousands of Hong Kong residents booked tickets for the first weeks, and the opening established the pattern the museum has followed since: collection displays that rotate and reinterpret the holdings, punctuated by large special exhibitions in the West Gallery and Main Hall Gallery, which change every few months.

Special Exhibitions and Public Programmes

The best known of the early special exhibitions was "Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now", described as the largest retrospective of the Japanese artist in Asia outside Japan, with more than 200 works including paintings, drawings, sculptures, installations and archival material. Later landmark shows have been devoted to figures such as the architect I. M. Pei and the artist Lee Bul, and the museum's programme has continued to mix collection-based displays with new commissions and touring subjects. In October 2026, as part of its fifth anniversary celebrations, M+ announced a cultural alliance with the Museum of Modern Art and the Centre Pompidou, signed at M+ by directors Christophe Cherix, Laurent Le Bon and Suhanya Raffel, covering shared exhibitions, joint programming, long-term loans and cooperation on curatorial research and conservation. Anniversary programming included a festival of restored Hong Kong New Wave films, reflecting the museum's commitment to the moving image as part of visual culture.

Leadership and Governance

M+ is owned and governed through the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority, the statutory body that develops and operates the whole district; this profile concerns the museum itself, and the Authority is profiled separately. The museum's early leadership included executive director Lars Nittve, who led the project through the acquisition of the Sigg Collection and the selection of the architects before stepping down at the end of 2015 while continuing as an external adviser, and curator Pi Li, who joined in 2012 as senior curator of Chinese art. Suhanya Raffel has been the museum's director since January 2019 and led it through its opening and first five years. The chairman of the M+ board in its fifth-anniversary year was Paulo Pong, who is also a member of the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority board.

Visitors and Place in Hong Kong

The museum cost about HK$5.9 billion to build, and it has quickly become one of Hong Kong's most visited cultural venues: it recorded 2,612,691 visitors in 2024, and its leadership reported more than 2.5 million visitors annually for three consecutive years and more than 12.5 million visits in its first five years. Its position at the southern edge of Kowloon, with the Roof Garden and facade facing the harbour, has made the building itself a landmark of the district. Within the West Kowloon Cultural District it sits alongside the Art Park, the Hong Kong Palace Museum, the Xiqu Centre and Freespace, but its role is distinct: it is the district's museum of the modern and contemporary, collecting and interpreting the visual culture of the last hundred years from Hong Kong outward to Asia and the world.

Visiting M+

M+ stands at 38 Museum Drive in the West Kowloon Cultural District, reachable through the district's waterfront promenade and from the Kowloon and Austin station area. Some parts of the building, such as the Roof Garden and areas of the lower floors, are freely accessible, while the main gallery floors operate on ticketed admission, with standard and concession prices published on the museum's official website, mplus.org.hk. Visitors typically need several hours to cover the thirty-three galleries, the cinemas and the Mediatheque, and the programme changes regularly, so the museum advises checking its current exhibitions page before a visit. The M+ Shop, restaurants and lounges in the tower, and the harbour views from the Roof Garden complete a visit that is as much about the building and its setting as about the works inside it.