About Hong Kong Museum of Art

Hong Kong Museum of Art

The Hong Kong Museum of Art (香港藝術館; HKMoA) is the first and main art museum of Hong Kong, at 10 Salisbury Road, Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon, on the Victoria Harbour waterfront, managed by the Leisure and Cultural Services Department (LCSD). It holds a collection of almost 20,000 items — over 17,000 at earlier counts and 18,800 in recent accounts — and recorded 1.69 million visitors in 2025. Admission to its permanent exhibitions is free. Established in City Hall in 1962, it is Hong Kong's oldest public art museum, and its collections of Chinese painting and calligraphy, Chinese antiquities, trade art and Hong Kong art document both China's artistic heritage and Hong Kong's own emergence as an art city.

Establishment in City Hall in 1962

The museum was established by the Urban Council as the City Hall Museum and Art Gallery, which opened on 2 March 1962 in City Hall, Central — the first public museum of any kind in modern Hong Kong. In July 1975 the institution was split into the Hong Kong Museum of History and the Museum of Art; the art museum continued on the 8th to 11th floors of the High Block of City Hall. For its first three decades, therefore, Hong Kong's art museum occupied floors of a civic building rather than a home of its own, even as its collections grew through purchase and, crucially, through donations from Hong Kong's community of collectors and connoisseurs. Hong Kong's unique position — a thriving marketplace for the trade in Chinese antiquities and a refuge for artworks carried out of mainland China during the wars and turmoil of the 1940s and 1950s — meant that exceptional private collections formed in the city, and the museum became their natural eventual home.

The move to Tsim Sha Tsui in 1991

In 1991 the Museum of Art moved to its present premises at 10 Salisbury Road, Tsim Sha Tsui, near the Hong Kong Cultural Centre and the Hong Kong Space Museum, and was formally inaugurated by Governor Chris Patten on 11 September 1992. The purpose-built waterfront museum gave Hong Kong, for the first time, a dedicated art museum building, with galleries for Chinese painting and calligraphy, Chinese antiquities, historical pictures and contemporary Hong Kong art, and space for major visiting exhibitions. Its position in the Tsim Sha Tsui cultural complex, facing Victoria Harbour, placed art at the symbolic centre of Hong Kong's cultural life alongside the concert halls of the Cultural Centre and the dome of the Space Museum. Renamed the Hong Kong Museum of Art, the institution also carried responsibility for the territory's art biennial: it has hosted the Hong Kong Art Biennial Exhibition since 1975, renamed the Hong Kong Contemporary Art Biennial Awards in 2009, the principal open competition and showcase for Hong Kong artists.

The collections: four principal areas

The museum's displays rotate paintings, calligraphy and sculpture from Hong Kong, mainland China and the wider world across four principal collecting areas, as presented in its reopening exhibition Ordinary to Extraordinary: Stories of the Museum, which was divided into Chinese Trade Art, Chinese Antiquities, Chinese Painting and Calligraphy, and Modern and Hong Kong Art. Chinese antiquities include ceramics, bronzes, jade and decorative arts from the Han dynasty onwards. Chinese trade art — the paintings, porcelain and objects made in Canton and Hong Kong for export to the West in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — is a field in which Hong Kong's museum is especially strong, reflecting the city's own origins as a trading port. Modern and Hong Kong art presents the work of Hong Kong artists from the early twentieth century to the present, including masters such as Wu Guanzhong, alongside works by artists including Qi Baishi and Zhang Daqian in the wider Chinese collections. In total the collection has grown from its City Hall beginnings to almost 20,000 items, representing, in the museum's words, the unique cultural legacy of Hong Kong's connection to the world.

The Xubaizhai Collection

The Xubaizhai Gallery of Chinese Painting and Calligraphy was built in 1992, in the new Tsim Sha Tsui museum, to provide a permanent home for the collection donated by the renowned art connoisseur Low Chuck-tiew (1911–1993). Low arrived in Hong Kong after the Second World War and soon realised the extent of the exodus of Chinese artworks from China through the territory, then a thriving marketplace for the trade in Chinese antiquities. He assembled his collection under the name Xubaizhai, after one of his most treasured items, a calligraphic plaque by Yi Bingshou (1754–1815). The collection primarily encompasses works from the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) dynasties through the twentieth century, and is particularly rich in masterpieces from the major painting schools, including the Wu School, the Songjiang School, the Four Monks, the Orthodox School and the Eight Eccentrics of Yangzhou. Low donated his collection to the Hong Kong Museum of Art in 1989, hoping it could be preserved and made available for public display to maximise its educational and historical value; the museum acknowledges the donation as a valuable enrichment that significantly expanded its previously rather parochial focus into a comprehensive collection of undoubted quality. The inauguration of the Xubaizhai Gallery acknowledged an eminent connoisseur's gesture in turning an important private collection into a valuable public one.

The Chih Lo Lou Collection

A second great donation transformed the museum a generation later. The Chih Lo Lou Collection of Chinese painting and calligraphy was founded by the late entrepreneur and philanthropist Ho Iu-kwong, who built one of the three most important private collections of Chinese paintings and calligraphy in Hong Kong — the other two being the Xubaizhai Collection, also housed at the museum, and Bei Shan Tang, originally the private studio of the late philanthropist Lee Jung Sen. Ho named his studio Chih Lo Lou, meaning house of bliss, and, reportedly spending a fortune, acquired works dating from as early as the Song dynasty (960–1279) to safeguard them from being lost during the wars and political turmoil that raged over mainland China in the twentieth century, when many treasures were carried to Hong Kong by those escaping the mainland. In 2018 the collection — 355 Chinese paintings and calligraphic works dating from the Song dynasty through the twentieth century, estimated at more than HK$3.8 billion — was gifted to the museum by the Chi Lo Lou Promotion foundation founded by Ho. It was introduced to the public for the first time as part of the museum's reopening in 2019, in a permanent Chih Lo Lou Gallery of Chinese Painting and Calligraphy. Highlights include Zha Shibiao's The Fisherman (1684), Hongren's Retreat in a Mountain of Pines, and Zhang Daqian's Splashed-colour Landscape (1966), painted after Zhang met Ho in Hong Kong, reflecting Ho's friendships with modern artists. As curator Sunny Tang explained at the reopening, the museum's major donations from private collectors illustrate the trajectory of art collecting in Hong Kong and retrace the footsteps of the city's history: these works ended up in Hong Kong because of the city's unique status.

Closure, expansion and the 2019 reopening

The museum closed on 3 August 2015 for a major expansion and renovation costing HK$400 million, and reopened on 30 November 2019. The four-year project enlarged its exhibition spaces and opened up its facade to Victoria Harbour, incorporating the harbour view into the museum as if it were a living scroll, with new galleries, improved facilities and a contemporary architectural treatment that made the building more transparent to the waterfront. The reopening displays presented the story of the museum itself, from ordinary to extraordinary, alongside the first public presentation of the Chih Lo Lou Collection. The renovated museum, which turned 58 in 2020, restated its mission: to reinstate and celebrate the role Hong Kong has played in art collecting and in safeguarding historic cultural treasures, as well as to present Hong Kong art itself. Visitor response confirmed the renewal — the museum recorded 1.69 million visitors in 2025, among the highest figures for any museum in Hong Kong.

Hong Kong art and the biennial tradition

Alongside its Chinese collections, the museum is the principal public custodian of Hong Kong art. Its Modern and Hong Kong Art holdings trace the development of art in Hong Kong from early twentieth-century painters working in both Chinese and Western traditions, through the modernist movements of the post-war decades, to contemporary practice. Through the Hong Kong Art Biennial Exhibition, hosted since 1975 and renamed the Hong Kong Contemporary Art Biennial Awards in 2009, the museum has provided the territory's main competitive platform for living artists for half a century; many of Hong Kong's leading artists first came to public attention through it. Exhibitions of Hong Kong art at the museum typically mix painting, ink art, sculpture, installation and new media, presenting Hong Kong identity as something continually made and remade by its artists — a curatorial theme that scholarly commentators have debated vigorously, itself evidence of the museum's centrality to arguments about Hong Kong culture.

The Flagstaff House Museum of Tea Ware

The museum's branch is the Flagstaff House Museum of Tea Ware, in Hong Kong Park, Central. Flagstaff House, built in the 1840s as the residence of the Commander of British Forces in Hong Kong and among the oldest surviving Western-style buildings in Hong Kong, was converted into a museum of tea ware in 1984. It displays Chinese tea ware and related vessels from the collection of the collector K. S. Lo, including Yixing teapots, and presents the history and culture of tea drinking in China. The branch extends the main museum's Chinese decorative arts collections into a specialist field and a historic building, and it remains a quiet counterpart, in a park setting, to the large waterfront museum in Tsim Sha Tsui.

Programmes, access and role today

The Hong Kong Museum of Art is managed by the Leisure and Cultural Services Department and offers free admission to its permanent exhibitions, with charges only for certain special exhibitions. It presents a rotating programme of special exhibitions drawn from its own collections and from museums in mainland China and around the world, alongside lectures, workshops, guided tours and education programmes for schools and families. Its location in the Tsim Sha Tsui cultural complex — beside the Hong Kong Cultural Centre, facing the Space Museum and a short walk from the Museum of History and Science Museum in Tsim Sha Tsui East — makes it part of the densest museum district in Hong Kong. As Hong Kong's first public art museum, the guardian of the Xubaizhai and Chih Lo Lou collections, and the home of the biennial tradition, the Hong Kong Museum of Art stands as both the city's memory of Chinese art collecting and its continuing forum for art in Hong Kong today.