This was one of the first museum to open at the brand new West Kowloon Cultural Centre. And it definitely puts Hong Kong onto the world map for cultural venues.
The Architecture
The landmark M+ building on Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbourfront was designed by the world-renowned architectural firm Herzog & de Meuron in partnership with TFP Farrells and Arup.
It spans a total floor area of 65,000 square metres, featuring thirty-three galleries alongside a Learning Hub, Moving Image Centre, Research Centre, and Roof Garden, among other event and programming spaces.
The M+ Facade is one of the largest LED screens in the world, showcasing commissioned artworks on the Hong Kong skyline every evening.
The museum stewards a multidisciplinary permanent collection that includes objects from regions across Asia and beyond. A highlight is the M+ Sigg Collection, one of the world’s most comprehensive collections of Chinese contemporary art. Today, M+ is a nexus for researching and presenting contemporary visual culture, inspiring thought and curiosity.
M+ Sigg Collection
Oil on canvas | born 1962, Henan, died 2018, Zhejiang | M+ Sigg Collection, Hong Kong
As M+’s founding collection, the M+ Sigg Collection is the result of a generous donation in 2012 by Swiss collector Dr Uli Sigg of part of his private collection of Chinese contemporary art. The Sigg Galleries are named in recognition of this donation, and will remain so in perpetuity. 2
Oil on canvas | born 1958, Yunnan, works Beijing | M+ Sigg Collection, Hong Kong. By donation
The M+ Sigg Collection traces the development of Chinese art over the decades from the Cultural Revolution in the 1970s to China’s economic reform in the 1980s, followed by urbanisation and globalisation around the millennium. In each of these contexts, Chinese artists acted as agents of change. This gallery shows some of the most iconic works from the collection to chart a trajectory of contemporary Chinese art history.
About Uli Sigg
Uli Sigg has been following the development of contemporary art in China since the late 1970s. In the mid-1990s, he started putting together the world’s most significant and representative collection of Chinese art. A business journalist, entrepreneur, and Swiss ambassador to China, North Korea, and Mongolia (1995–1998), he had the chance to take a look behind the scenes of the social and economic developments dedicated to both tradition and the future, as China’s vision of a new Silk Road began to emerge.
The Socialist Experience
Chromogenic print | born 1965, Henan, works Shanghai | M+ Sigg Collection, Hong Kong. By donation
China underwent unprecedented social and cultural change, which led to one of the most important art historical moments of our time. The artists featured in the Sigg Galleries created powerful works that convey the impact and emotions behind these shifts. Even the subtlest change can influence our lives.
Oil on canvas | born 1973, Beijing, works Beijing | M+ Sigg Collection, Hong Kong. By donation
In the 1980s, Chinese avant-garde art offered strong critiques of the constraints of the Socialist Realist style and Cultural Revolution imagery. As Chinese art became globally visible in the 1990s, artists revisited socialist images in a new light to affirm their cultural identity. They explored their positions in a rapidly internationalising art world and thought about how contemporary art could be conceived and produced
M+ Sigg Collection: Another Story
Chromogenic print | born 1955, Jiangsu; works Beijing | M+ Sigg Collection, Hong Kong. By donation
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.
Wang Guangyi, “Great Criticism: Chanel” (2001)
王廣義 《大批判：香奈兒》
Oil on canvas | born 1957, Heilongjiang; works Beijing | M+ Sigg Collection, Hong Kong. By donation
王廣義 《大批判：香奈兒》
Four figures, each holding Mao Zedong’s little red book of quotations, stand in front of a red-and-white backdrop symbolising Mao, the rising sun. Wang Guangyi juxtaposes this imagery from the Cultural Revolution with the Chanel No. 5 perfume logo, a symbol of consumer culture, to create visual tension. The work highlights the obsession over consumer goods in 1990s China and the push and pull between capitalism and socialism.
Liu Ding, “Products” (2005)
劉鼎 《產品》
Oil on canvas, gilded frame, wooden table and stools, textile | born 1976, Jiangsu; works Beijing | M+ Sigg Collection, Hong Kong. By donation
劉鼎 《產品》
Shenzhen’s Dafen Village is a centre of oil painting production famous for cheap and quick replicas of famous artworks. Liu Ding hired thirteen painters from the village to create these forty landscapes.
They were given two hours to copy a composition Liu had selected, with each painter focusing on one element from the sample, such as the sky or the cranes. Liu then installed the paintings at the 2005 Guangzhou Triennial, an international contemporary art exhibition, blurring the boundary between imitation and authorship and questioning the mass production of images.
Chen Shaoxiong, “Collectivity Memory-Guangzhou. Zhongxin Plaza” (2006)
陳劭雄《集體記憶：廣州中信廣場》
Ink on rice paper | born 1962, Guangdong; died 2016, Beijing | M+ Sigg Collection, Hong Kong. By donation
陳劭雄《集體記憶：廣州中信廣場》
From a close distance, you see numerous ink fingerprints in different shades of grey. Viewed from afar, the prints combine to form CITIC Plaza, a landmark in Guangzhou. This hazy image is the result of Chen Shaoxiong inviting locals to construct the cityscape with their fingerprints.
When more people take part in a creative exercise, more fragments of their memory are gathered, but their vision of the city also becomes more obscure. Chen’s series of paintings involving public participation explores how China’s social development has changed cities and collective memory.
Wang Du, “Stratégie en chambre” (1999)
王度《紙上談兵》
Painted plaster, plastic, and paper | born 1956, Hubei, works Paris | M+ Sigg Collection, Hong Kong. By donation
Wang Du was in Paris when the war in Kosovo broke out in 1998. Reading Western European newspapers as well as coverage from outlets in Yugoslavia, he noticed that different narratives about the war were being told. Wang began to collect daily reports and analyses, creating an assemblage of papers with plastic toy tanks, ships, and fighter jets.
Busts of American president Bill Clinton and Russian president Boris Yeltsin appear embedded within this carefully landscaped battlefield. The work’s title, which translates from French as “armchair strategy”, describes the position of a distant observer whose idle talk is based entirely on media reportage. Wang creates a war zone in which alternate truths engage in conflict.
Liu Chuang, “Buying Everything On You (Cheng Qing)” (2009)
劉窗 《收購你身上的所有東西（程晴）》7
Personal belongings | born 1978, Hubei, works Beijing | SIGG COLLECTION
Like a time capsule, the artist captured a snapshot of a girl named Cheng Qing that most likely came from Hubei (guessed from the area code of the plastic bag). She could be any other girl in the year 2009, full of hope of the future, coming to Shenzhen, hoping to make it big through MLM (like Mary Kay). It was really interesting to try to interpret someone’s life through Sherlock Holmes’ deductions. 16 years later, is she married? Has she made it in life? I was amused but this composition as I was there during the economic boom of the early 21st century and witnessed the meteoric rise of China middle-class.
Yayoi Kusama, “Dots Obsession – Aspiring to Heaven’s Love” (2022)
草間彌生 《圓點執念──渴望天堂的愛》
Vinyl balloons, acrylic, mirrored glass, tiles, LED lighting system, wood, metal | Collection of the artist | Courtesy of Ota Fine Arts
Dots Obsession—Aspiring to Heaven’s Love presents artist Yayoi Kusama’s signature polka dots and reflective mirrors. Large balloons covered with white polka dots are suspended from the ceiling. Going deeper into the space, visitors will encounter a mirrored cubic environment that brings a kaleidoscopic experience. The work is a renewed manifestation of Kusama’s signature mirrored spaces and happenings from the 1960s. It provides a new dimension for understanding of the artist’s core concept of infinity and accumulation. The perceptual experience brought by the repetition of dots and the illusion of infinite space obliterates one into the cosmos.
Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929, Japan) is one of the most important and influential Asian artists in the history of contemporary art. She is renowned for her prolific and ground-breaking practice, spanning paintings, sculptures, performances, moving images, and large-scale installations. Trained in traditional Japanese painting, she moved to the United States in 1957 and soon established herself in the American and European avant-garde for her unique and radical artistic language. She returned to Japan in 1973 and has relentlessly reinvented and created art that resonates with the time in which she lives.
About M+
M+ is Asia’s global museum of contemporary visual culture. Located in Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District (WestK), it is dedicated to collecting, exhibiting, and interpreting visual art, design and architecture, moving image, and Hong Kong visual culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Opening Hours
- Tuesdays to Thursdays and weekends: 10:00–18:00
- Fridays: 10:00–22:00
- Mondays: Closed
M+ is highly recommended not only if you love or are interested in modern art, design and architecture. Focusing on various disciplines as well as having thematic collections such as e.g. Hong Kong’s visual culture makes this museum a must-visit. The large collections are very well curated.
M+
West Kowloon Cultural District, 38 Museum Drive, Kowloon
Online ticketing
Visited Dec 2023
Footnotes:
- In this sequence of four portraits, Geng Jianyi captures a face mid-laugh. He shows the subtle changes in expression and sets the portraits against a solid backdrop that removes all context From the founding of the People’s Republic of China to the Cultural Revolution and then the ’85 New Wave, history was seeminal aramallar by passionate beliefs. Geng’s work sets aside these fervent ideals, examining the mechanics of laughing and taking a measured assessment of reality. Museum Information Card ↩︎
- “Uli Sigg’s $170 million art donation to M+ Hong Kong” accessed 30 Oct 2025, https://starkwhite.co.nz/uli-siggs-170-million-art-donation-to-m-hong-kong/ ↩︎
- In the Bloodline series, Zhang Xiaogang uses his family photographs as a source of inspiration. This image resembles a family portrait taken before the economic reform in China in the 1980s. Wearing grey outfits, which suggests conformity, the family is connected by a red line while the children’s expressionless faces are overlaid in pale yellow and red. These interventions form a reflection on social history through family relationships. Museum Information Card ↩︎
- This photograph documents a performance in which Zhang Huan and nine other artists from the Beijing East Village community, an avant-garde group formed in the 1990s, lay on top of one another on Miaofeng Mountain to add one metre to the peak. The performance conveys how small changes can be significant. It has also become the most iconic representation of the Beijing East Village artists’ collaborative way of working. Museum Information Card ↩︎
- This painting is a collage of enlarged historical photos that appear fragmented into different points of view. A girl wearing a red scarf reads from Mao Zedong’s little red book of quotations to an audience of doctors and patients. Attention is drawn to the facial expressions and body language of the different figures, but Li Songsong’s signature thick layers of paint blur their faces, inviting speculation. Li often manipulates historical photos by editing and obscuring their content, causing the viewer to doubt the truthfulness of what is being portrayed. Museum Information Card ↩︎
- Left to right
“Power Space Series-Village Chief’s Office of Shazhong Village, Nancun Town, Guangling County, Shanxi Province” 《權利空間系列——山西省廣靈縣南村鎮沙中村村長辦公室》
2007
chromogenic print
M+ Sigg Collection, Hong Kong. By donation
“Power Space Series-Village Chief’s Office of Shangguan Village, Xiaguan Township, Lingqiu County, Shanxi Province” 《權利空間系列——山西省靈丘縣下關鄉上關村村長辦公室》
2007
chromogenic print
M+ Sigg Collection, Hong Kong. By donation
“Power Space Series-Village Chief’s Office of Wuzhuang Village, Tushan Town, Pizhou City, Jiangsu Province” 《權利空間系列——江蘇省邳州市土山鎮吳莊村村長辦公室》
2007
chromogenic print
M+ Sigg Collection, Hong Kong. By donation
“Power Space Series-Village Chief’s Office of Zhaojiaping Village, Nancun Township, Guangling County, Shanxi Province” 《權利空間系列—山西省廣靈縣南村鄉趙家坪村村長辦公室》
chromogenic print
M+ Sigg Collection, Hong Kong. By donation
Museum Information Card ↩︎ - Liu’s early work is underscored by a kind of romantic quality and a latent archeological interest. In Buying Everything on You (2005–) – the first work that earned the artist international attention, and secured his participation in the New Museum’s first triennial, ‘Younger than Jesus’ (2009) – Liu approached migrants job-hunting in a Shenzhen labor market and asked them if he could buy their belongings. The artist then exhibited the purchased objects in the museum as stand-ins for the people he had met, a searing commentary on the implementation of capitalist ideology and the distribution of resources in post-socialist China. “Meet the artist-explorer Liu Chuang”, Alvin Li, accessed 30 Oct 2025, Art Basel. https://www.artbasel.com/stories/liu-chuang-artist-portrait-bitcoin-mining ↩︎
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