Book in Focus: Hong Kong Visual Culture, The M+ Guide

After ten years in the making, the opening of M+ Museum in November 2021 has been a cultural milestone for Hong Kong. M+ is the first of a new generation of large-scale museums centering not only on traditional art, but more broadly on visual culture, with a particular focus on the last and current centuries, within an Asian context.

What is visual culture? It is everything we see on our day to day life: paintings, movies, photographs, advertising, landscape, buildings, apparel, etc. – anything within our culture that communicates through visual means.

Hong Kong mix of local and international influences made it a relevant opportunity for M+ Museum to focus on the myriad of realities the city’s visual culture is representing.

To support the museum’s ambition and positioning, M+ and long-established publishing house Thames & Hudson have published the book Hong Kong Visual Culture: The M+ Guide, featuring a journey through M+’s collection and telling the story of the city’s past and present through its works of art and key landmarks.

As mentioned by M+ Director Suhanya Raffel in the foreword, “the structure of this book is simple, and the texts are short and easy to digest. But the paths that it charts branch in many directions, leading to a density and a complexity that are characteristic of Hong Kong’s visual histories and realities”.

With more than 250 photographs and illustrations, and a specially commissioned cover by Hong Kong artist Don Mak, the book is arranged into three main sections: Things, Places and Perspectives, where objects and ideas are connected by individual and collective histories and patterns.

Things focuses on artworks and objects that reflect daily life in Hong Kong, and that have shaped the history of the city since the beginning of the twentieth century: from “Made in Hong Kong” products, locally manufactured and globally circulated, such as cameras, watches, clothing, plastic goods, to artistic and design practices it has inspired, including Alan Chan’s design of the album cover for Cantopop artist Anita Mui in 1984.

Places documents the urban environment, in a city where only 24 per cent of the 1,111 square kilometres has been developed. Hong Kong has a unique topography and has challenged architects, developers and designers to shape the city through innovative ways, like Zaha Hadid who described her design for a residential complex on Victoria Peak as a “man-made polished granite mountain”.

Finally, Perspectives concentrates on artistic perspectives and approaches that demonstrate the city’s unique outlook. The works in this section express personal sentiments about Hong Kong, introspective and political interpretations of artists lived experiences, such as Irene Chou and her own departure from ink tradition, or painter Luis Chan and his fantastical worlds.

This guide can be seen as a point of departure, an invitation to explore both the museum and Hong Kong significant visual culture and contribution to the global material culture. You can even enjoy a special treat with the book: a map of Hong Kong illustrated by Don Mak!