As Hong Kong museum M+ celebrates a new alliance on its fifth birthday, its director talks candidly to Monocle about the institution’s profitability and censorship battles amid an Asian art boom.
Hong Kong’s M+ museum has plenty to celebrate as it blows out the candles on its fifth birthday cake this November. Annual visitor numbers have hit 2.5 million, surpassing the team’s internal benchmark and bringing it closer to the likes of Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art (Moma) in New York. The directors of these two venerable institutions joined their M+ counterpart, Suhanya Raffel, for its anniversary celebrations in Hong Kong.
The heavyweight trio marked the milestone by announcing a “cultural alliance” that will involve world-class collections, knowledge and talent moving with greater frequency between the US, Europe and Asia.
Monocle sat down with Raffel at M+ to get her perspective on this landmark announcement.
This cultural alliance is brilliant news for art lovers. Why do this with Moma and Centre Pompidou specifically out of all the celebrated museums in the world?
When we were conceiving M+, these two institutions were our intellectual and cultural guides because we’re also multidisciplinary; the Tate doesn’t do architecture or design. We are looking at deep collections that define our times. You go to Moma if you want to know what it means to be modern in the 20th century. If you want to know what it means to make contemporary Chinese art historical, you come to M+.
Your counterpart at Moma, Christophe Cherix, says each institution will act as an embassy for the others. What will actually change?
Things will amplify. Right now we have Janet Cardiff’s 40-part motet from Moma’s collection on display here and it’s that kind of work that will be seen in Hong Kong and vice versa. For the first time, New York and Paris will have collections from M+ next year. The relationship between Asia and those institutions has often been a one-way track. We wanted to change that and make it three ways.
How will this work while the Centre Pompidou is closed for five years?
It has just opened its new facility in Massy, 20 minutes outside the centre of Paris. For the first time, Centre Pompidou has consolidated its collection and storage into one place, so from March next year, that’s where we will begin to show our moving image works.
What does it mean that these two globally renowned institutions chose M+ to represent Asia?
M+ is the first institution to have a multidisciplinary collection and interest in Asia. There is nothing equivalent to M+ in Japan, South Korea or mainland China. It’s a recognition of equivalence and that [M+’s] collections are distinctive, authoritative and important. Laurent [Le Bon, director of Centre Pompidou] always says that an injection of energy from a young institution and a new way of seeing is necessary for older institutions.
How much has censorship been an issue during your tenure?
Curatorial integrity is always taken as the most serious and important core of what we do. We all work within the laws of our countries and cities. We never break those and we also ensure that the content is clear and trusted. I can confidently say that we have been able to do that successfully. You just have to go and see the the collections or the exhibitions to know that.
That doesn’t always come through in the media coverage of M+ and the reported removal of artworks by some Chinese artists…
That is more of a reflection of a prejudice on another side than the reality of what’s on the floor – and that’s a big problem around the world. We all have to work within the cultural realities of each of our places – and that changes. We have seen in Berlin that Candice Breitz couldn’t show work. I have seen it with Art and China After 1989 at the Guggenheim, where we loaned about a third of that exhibition. Three works were not able to be shown in New York and San Francisco but went to Bilbao without a problem. Richard Armstrong, who was a director at the Guggenheim at the time, said, ‘I thought I was doing an exhibition about China but it became a mirror to America.’ These are very interesting facts about what happens when work travels but it’s very important not to demonise it.
Has M+ been asked to remove works?
No, there has been nothing particularly like that. It’s always about ensuring that when we put our collections and exhibitions together, we are conscious of what we’re doing and how we’re doing it. We make sure that it’s not crossing any of those red lines. People always say Ai Weiwei but there he is upstairs. We have a beautiful Ai Weiwei piece on display right now.
Do you have to submit exhibition plans to the government or censor beforehand?
No, nothing like that. That doesn’t happen in Hong Kong.
How is business going – does M+ pay its way?
No museum in the whole world makes money. None of us are profit-making [institutions], so we always have a form of subvention or endowment to support the museum’s work. We are at a 47 per cent cost recovery, which is very high for what we do. I think Moma is at 55 per cent and Centre Pompidou is maybe a bit less than us. Our aim is to sustain that level between 45 to 50 per cent.
And, finally, what’s one big thing coming to M+ in 2027?
An exhibition called Landmarks: Architecture in Asia for the 21st Century will look at the first 25 years of the 21st century through 50 architecture projects across the continent. It’s a very unique show because you realise that the great developments in architecture have taken place in Asia, including responses to issues of sustainability and environment. The things that have taken place in this part of the world are incredible and nobody has really thought to speak about them.
