MAKING HISTORY

The Hong Kong Museum of Art reopens this month after a four-year-long makeover costing nearly HK$1 billion. Director Maria Mok opens the doors for an exclusive first look

- Oliver Giles

When the Hong Kong Museum of Art (HKMOA) reopens at the end of this year, one of its 11 exhibitions will feature some of the most famous landscape paintings in the world—all of them on loan from London’s Tate. Hongkongers will have the chance to see a moody maritime scene by JMW Turner, a sprawling, 12.2m long landscape by David Hockney and more than 70 other drawings, prints and paintings. But the show isn’t going to be a by-the-book look back at the best of British art.

“With travelling exhibitions, we are not going to restrict ourselves to something that’s like an instant noodle project,” says Maria Mok, director of HKMOA. “We want to expand these exhibitions and infuse them with our own voice—a specific Hong Kong viewpoint. So, for the Tate exhibition, we’ve invited local artists, Simon Wan and Joey Leung, to present their photography, mixed media work and Chinese paintings to initiate a new dialogue with British landscape painters. We want to offer this Hong Kong viewpoint in all of our programmes. I think HKMOA has a unique opportunity to tell the stories of Hong Kong through art.”

Following a four-year-long, HK$930 million renovation, HKMOA now has more opportunities to tell these stories than ever before. Architect Vivian Fung kept the shell of the old building but added a new wing and another floor of exhibition space, increasing gallery space from roughly 75,000sqft to nearly 110,000sqft. Fung also clad the whole building in a rippling glass facade that echoes the waves of Victoria Harbour, which the museum overlooks. “There are enormous floor-to-ceiling windows on every floor, so people can see the skyline and the harbour—Hong Kong’s most famous work of art,” says Mok.