M+ Museum has finally opened its doors in Hong Kong

In Los Angeles, there’s also the revamped Courtauld Gallery and Black American Portraits at Lacma.

The long-awaited M+ Museum in Hong Kong opens this week, despite censorship charges from Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. Ilaria Maria Sala joins us to share her experience at the museum.

After a three-year makeover, the Courtauld Gallery, one of London’s extraordinary collections, reopens, and we take a tour with director Ernst Vegelin van Claerbergen. He highlights a few significant works:

In this week’s work of the week, Christine Y Kim tells us about Samella Lewis’ Bag Man, a significant position in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s exhibition Black American Portraits.

M+’s custom building on the Victoria Harbour waterfront in Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District was designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron in collaboration with TFP Farrells and Arup.

Upon entering the museum, guests are met by natural light streaming into the main hall’s vast, concrete structure. The museum has an industrial style with vertical iron rails, wooden floors, and large glass windows.

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Large-scale ink-on-paper calligraphic works by artist Tong Yang-Tze, commissioned by M+, are displayed on the concrete columns of the main hall. The smooth, flowing movements of the Chinese letters’ brushstrokes bring vitality to the area.

Colorful digital screens with animations of the names of M+ museum benefactors are juxtaposed against these pieces. The stylized kinetic typography mixes technology with the importance of language in visual culture.

The museum is built on reclaimed land, with portions in the sea filled with earth, and the MTR Airport Express and Tung Chung Line tunnels are located beneath the site.

Excavations around the tunnels uncovered a “found area” that can accommodate large-scale installations.

The curatorial team chose Danh Vo’s We the People (2011–16), a sculpture made of fragmented copper plates depicting the Statue of Liberty’s right shoulder and underarm, and Chen Zhen’s Round Table – Side by Side (1997), two large wooden tables connected surrounded by 28 chairs in both Eastern and Western styles, for the opening.

Source: The Art Newspaper, art news