M+ will transform the West Kowloon skyline

LUX Contributing Editor and Hong Kong art and design doyen Alan Lo in conversation with Suhanya Raffel, the director of M+ – a museum set to change the conversation about Asia’s place in the art world

It may just be the most important contemporary cultural development in the world. Hong Kong’s M+ museum of visual culture is, finally, scheduled to open in early 2021 after years of anticipation (and a few delays). The Herzog & De Meuron-designed building will not just be a stunning addition to the skyline, it will be the cornerstone of the new West Kowloon Cultural District – an area which, along with Adrian Cheng’s K11 development in Victoria Dockside, will transform Hong Kong. The city has always been known for its commerce and cuisine, but with M+ – the most sophisticated and extensive showcase of its type in the world – it is set to make the leap towards becoming a major player culturally, too.

The figures are staggering: M+ has nearly twice the floor area of London’s gargantuan Tate Modern. It has already purchased all the existing and future work of funky digital collective Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries. Expect plenty more fireworks to come.

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Alan Lo: You joined M+ from the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2016. Why Hong Kong at this juncture in your career? What do you hope to achieve as executive director?
Suhanya Raffel: The M+ project has always been on my radar. I’ve been visiting Hong Kong since the early 1990s and was keenly aware of the major cultural infrastructure programme on West Kowloon when it was being formulated. To deliver M+ as the museum director is an opportunity I couldn’t resist. Bringing a major cultural institution into Asia and seeing how it will transform Hong Kong is a key achievement. M+ will be the place to come and see Asian visual culture, as we naturally take a preeminent place among international museums.

Alan Lo: All eyes are on what will be the most important art institution in Asia. What can we expect at the opening?
Suhanya Raffel: We have spent the past six years assembling an outstanding collection of visual culture from the mid-20th century onwards. It is unique in scope and brings a necessary perspective to the understanding of design, architecture, visual art and moving image as it has developed in this part of the world. Our opening will be dedicated to profiling our collections and I know that it will bring entirely new points of view on the various histories of our region.

LUX Contributing Editor Alan Lo and M+ director Suhanya Raffel

Alan Lo: Critics have pointed to the M+ curatorial team’s lack of local/Hong Kong knowledge. What do you have to stay to that?
Suhanya Raffel: At M+ we embrace diversity, which is an important characteristic of Hong Kong, a global city with a proud history of being cosmopolitan and outward-looking. We have specialist curators of Hong Kong visual culture who have a deep knowledge of the work of artists, architects, designers and filmmakers from here. Our curators work together across disciplines and that brings a strength of vision and voice, both to the Hong Kong cultural community and beyond. We must add to the Hong Kong cultural ecology, embracing the strengths and contributions of Hong Kong makers and showing them together with their international peers. What has been missing here in Hong Kong is a major global institution developed from its local positioning, and this has now been redressed with the development of M+.

Alan Lo: How do you see the Hong Kong/Greater Bay Area art ecosystem evolving?
Suhanya Raffel: Hong Kong will grow even further as a major international centre for the arts. We have seen this growth already, and it will only amplify as collecting institutions, both public and private, establish themselves, with global best practice as a governing principle.

Read more: Designer Philipp Plein on mixing business with pleasure

Alan Lo: M+ will rely on support from art patrons locally and globally. Are you seeing healthy growth in art patronage in the region?
Suhanya Raffel: Yes, absolutely I can see a healthy growth of art patronage. The relationship between patrons, collectors, philanthropists, members and foundations in relation to M+ is already developing from strength to strength. It is only together with our various audiences and communities that a museum of M+’s scale can begin to be successful. When we open, it will be just the beginning of our museum’s journey, and ensuring our various stakeholders understand this is clearly one of the challenges.

Alan Lo: M+ began to co-commission the Hong Kong exhibition at Venice Biennale in 2013, which resulted in Hong Kong-based artists seeing a surge in prominence. Why do you think it’s important for M+ to play a role?
Suhanya Raffel: As a global museum, we see profiling Hong Kong artists, designers, architects and makers as an intrinsic part of our work. In this regard, M+ co-commissioning the Hong Kong in Venice Pavilion at the Venice Biennale has brought greater prominence to these artists, and by association, the Hong Kong art world.

The vast interior of M+ will have twice the floor area of London’s Tate Modern

Alan Lo: Many private museums have popped up in Asia. Would you like to see more private museum projects in Hong Kong?
Suhanya Raffel: A healthy mixture of private and public institutions is something to encourage. Hong Kong’s aspiration to become a cultural capital means we need to see more institutions of various scales across the private and public sphere take hold and grow. We are already seeing this take root, ensuring Hong Kong’s place as a great global cultural city.

Alan Lo: M+ is a major project focusing on contemporary visual culture. What about the audience in our region? Are the people of HK and southern China ready for M+?
Suhanya Raffel: Without question, the audiences are here. It is a young audience with a strong appetite for contemporary culture.

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Alan Lo: Do you think the shift in the global art market toward the top end is helping or hurting the ecosystem? How are museums changing to reflect the increasing concentration of art in private hands?
Suhanya Raffel: Public institutions cannot compete with the private market. That is why philanthropy is an important part of museum work. As we develop M+, to communicate our mission with passion and clarity is essential, and this helps us to develop our audiences. In Asia, the art world ecology is still in its early days, and this brings with it both challenges and opportunities. The establishment of a great public institution that is M+ will bring a much clearer understanding of how a museum adds enormous value to conversations around cultural and regional histories, and how they intersect with and add to essential global dialogues.

Alan Lo: In 20 years’ time, will the world’s major art institutions be split more evenly between west and east? How do you intend to position M+ in the context of this potential shift?
Suhanya Raffel: The M+ vision of bringing an Asian museum voice of substance with a deep multidisciplinary collection to support this position will inevitably change international discourse. The known Euro/American canon will shift, and I hope, with the establishment of M+, many other institutions across Asia will follow. This is healthy, important and vital.

Alan Lo: The influence of collectors has changed so much with social media – how would you like to see them play a role in the future of M+?
Suhanya Raffel: The role of social media and digital is the one revolution that defines our century. It is the new media and medium of exchange, operating at speed. Museums are traditionally slow-release platforms, but we must build agility and responsiveness. Working together with those who are already alert to these streams is essential and at M+ we are already embracing this parallel world!

Find out more: mplus.org.hk

This article was originally published in the Autumn 19 Issue.

‘Inside Out, Au Pantheon, Nef, Paris, France’; by JR (2014)

It’s not just the consumption of art that is being revolutionised by technology; it’s all about the democratisation of who can become a creative, and the effect this can have on society, says Mollie Dent-Brocklehurst

A LUX x ROSEWOOD COLLABORATION

Mollie Dent-Brocklehurst

A few years ago, I became aware of teamLab, an extraordinary group of  artists based in Tokyo. They have over  500 members in their organisation, and they  come from all walks of life. When you meet  them and exchange business cards, you will find one might be an architect, one might be a programmer. It’s quite an astonishing  group, all working together to create these amazing visual experiences. At the time, they had had numerous exhibitions in Japan; their immersive interactive digital works result in hugely colourful exhibitions.

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Most of their subject matter is based on the natural environment: they create flowers, birds, trees, fish, butterflies and waterfalls, and the viewer becomes part of the experience of the exhibition. Through the way in which their algorithms work, the artworks respond to and interact with visitors. Some of the pieces are very large, such as one in Tokyo where you roll up your trousers, take your shoes off and walk across the floor, and (digital) fish touch you, swim around you and swim away. In these exhibitions, the work is programmed at the start of the exhibition, but is influenced by the visitors. The artist stops having control from the moment the first visitor appears, which moves things on from the repetitive visual loop you would see in earlier video art displays.

teamLab digital art installation ‘The Infinite Crystal Universe’

It was when we [Pace Gallery] were hosting a show in Palo Alto, California, by teamLab, in the old Tesla factory, that it became evident that the old ‘white cube art gallery’ model was not the way to support artists such as these. The exhibition was ticketed, the space was huge, and it travelled to London and Beijing; its size and reach were beyond anything a traditional private gallery could host, as it had large-scale public appeal.

Tech engineers and programmers creating art is a major change for the future of creativity in general, and the art world in particular. Five or 10 years ago, I felt the art world to be slow on the uptake of technology. These artists are now creating a new world of art through technology, understanding the tools you need to bring the disciplines together. You have teams of people with science and technology backgrounds and others who have studied art together in a studio – people with sharply different backgrounds and skill sets. It’s unlikely you would have had engineers in an art studio just a decade ago.

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This means that participation is no longer just about the art world; we are reaching a much broader audience. Previously, the art world was confined to a very small percentage of people. Now the reach of these new types of art is much broader; through social media, millions are seeing it, and millions are visiting exhibitions by artists such as teamLab, JR or Random International. Studio Drift, a team we work with in the Netherlands, has just had an exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, which was one of the most-visited shows the museum has ever done.

They have a much wider reach than a typical contemporary art show. This in turn means there is a whole new category of people experiencing this kind of creativity, who wouldn’t go to see a show of works on canvas. It opens doors to new audiences, and it also by extension gives the opportunity for people to start to see themselves as artists who may not have otherwise considered doing so.

Here and above: ‘Trancending Boundaries’ by teamLab

We are in a moment in time when much is changing. Groups of artists have a much bigger reach, they are involved in conversations around nature and sustainability and technology, and all these artists care very much about how art can be part of people’s lives, moving nature into the built environment, and seeing how nature can be incorporated into modern life.

With FuturePace (through which we represent artist groups like these) and our partner Futurecity, we are involved in conversations with airports, cities and placemakers. There is a public realm element to it, lifting people’s lives with art experiences. JR, for example, is not just a street artist. He has a message he wants to convey, he is understood by a very broad swathe of people (he has 1.2 million Instagram followers) and his work has the power to transform societies. He has worked in favelas in Brazil, set up schools, started projects to feed homeless people, and worked against gun crime. He has seen that art has the power to speak to people and transform. He is very passionate and energetic in what he does, and he deals with art that is aimed to be visible to the many, not the few. And his art is not just for the wealthy. The democratisation of art is the next frontier, outside of the world of the galleries. It is an inclusive movement, inclusive of people who can make it and also of those who can consume it.

Mollie Dent-Brocklehurst is a former president of Pace London, the international gallery group, and co-founder of FuturePace, a collaboration between Pace and the placemaking city developer Futurecity. Find out more: future-pace.com

This article was originally published in the Winter 2019 issue.