Moments from M+ Museum

M+ opened in November 2021 in Hong Kong's West Kowloon Cultural District after roughly a decade of planning and construction, a museum built from the ground up around visual culture in the broadest possible sense, contemporary art, design, architecture, and moving image, rather than the narrower fine-art focus of most encyclopedic museums. The building itself, designed by Herzog & de Meuron, is a long horizontal structure with a distinctive illuminated facade facing Victoria Harbour that doubles at night as a public light installation visible across the water from Hong Kong Island.

As one of the largest museums of contemporary visual culture in Asia, it has quickly become a major anchor for the region's art scene, with a collection deliberately weighted toward Asian and Hong Kong-specific art history alongside major international names. Ride to the top floors first for the harbour views before working down through the collection, and check the facade after dark if you're staying in the area, the building's LED display, one of the largest of its kind in the world, runs its own changing program of digital art independent of what's showing inside.