HONG KONG — More than a decade ago, visual artist Kacey Wong built a tiny home out of aluminum, tires and plastic barrels and paddled it away in the ocean as a comment on Hong Kong’s unaffordable, cramped living quarters and eye-watering mortgages.
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Wong recently made his way out of Hong Kong again — this time on a plane, and probably for good. His tiny home, however, remains; one of the artworks proudly on display in the city’s striking and highly anticipated M+ museum, which opened to the public this weekend.
That Wong, 51, and several others will not be able to see their work on display in the new museum underscores the awkwardness of a visual arts museum opening in today’s Hong Kong. The city has been redefined by a new national security law that has crushed civil society; prompted an exodus of residents, including artists; and seen songs, political posters, slogans and movies disappear.
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The museum, which went over its almost-billion-dollar budget and was more than a decade in the making, compares itself to Paris’s Centre Pompidou and New York’s Museum of Modern Art — but it has already moved to censor work and avoid themes considered too political as it walks a tightrope between its aspiration to be a world-class institution and the hardening limits on free expression in Hong Kong.
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“It is like the skin being hung on the wall, but the person himself has slipped away,” Wong said of his work on display in an interview from his new home in Taiwan. “I’ve escaped, and that is amazingly political.”
Speaking at a media preview of the museum last week, Henry Tang, chairman of the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority, which oversees M+, made his government’s position clear.
“Our dedicated curatorial team will ensure that the exhibitions comply with the law, including Basic Law, National Security Law as well as all other laws in Hong Kong,” he said, adding that the “opening of M+ does not mean that artistic expression is above the law. It is not.”
That same day, across the harbor from West Kowloon where Tang was speaking and where journalists were previewing the museum’s collection in the 700,000-square-foot museum designed by Swiss architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron, a 31-year old man was found guilty under the national security law of advocating for secession by chanting slogans and sentenced to nearly six years in jail. The man, Adam Ma Chun-man, was dubbed “Captain America 2.0” during the 2019 protests in Hong Kong for wearing the superhero’s costume and shield.
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In a letter read out loud before his sentencing in court, he wrote, “on my road to democracy and freedom, I can’t afford to be a coward.”
Thomas Kellogg, the executive director of the Center for Asian Law at Georgetown University Law Center, said in a statement that the harsh sentence against Ma was a huge blow for free expression in Hong Kong.
“Key slogans — even entire political points of view — have been banned, and the list of forbidden phrases and ideas will likely only grow,” he said.
The museum was conceptualized in a dramatically different environment to today’s Hong Kong. The West Kowloon Cultural District, which M+ anchors, was first suggested by Hong Kong’s tourism authority in 1996, when preparations were underway for the city’s handover from the British to the Chinese the next year.
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In 1998, Hong Kong’s first chief executive, Tung Chee Hwa, proposed that Hong Kong be developed into Asia’s cultural and arts capital. Winning architects for the museum were selected in 2012, and construction began in early 2015.
M+ has been plagued with difficulties from the outset that were more logistical than political. Construction delays pushed the opening of the museum, initially slated for 2017, to 2019, then to 2020, before it finally opened this weekend. In 2018, the main contractor was fired after it became insolvent.
At its opening, Carrie Lam, Hong Kong’s chief executive, acknowledged the challenges, before adding that “Rome was not built in a day” and that the museum was “worth the wait.”
M+ has amassed one of the most impressive collections of Chinese contemporary art in the world, donated by Swiss businessman and art collector Uli Sigg, who is the largest private collector of such art globally. Another anchor exhibition tracks the development of Hong Kong’s visual culture from the 1960s onward, where Wong’s tiny home is featured.
Ahead of its opening, pro-Beijing politicians attacked the museum’s collection, specifically works from dissident exiled Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, as an “insult to the country.” When the museum opened this weekend, a piece featuring the artist’s upturned middle finger pointing toward the Gate of Heavenly Peace in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, which was especially criticized by the pro-Beijing camp, was absent from the exhibition, but two other Ai pieces were on display.
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Art from the 2014 Umbrella Movement protests in Hong Kong, as well as the 2019 protests, which has been featured in exhibitions around the world, is also absent. But some political art has survived, including a clip from “Ten Years,” a film presenting a dystopian reality of Hong Kong that now mirrors its political climate. Several of the film’s directors have also left Hong Kong, fearing persecution, and pro-Beijing lawmakers have criticized the film and used its past widespread screening to justify a new film censorship law.
Wong Ka Ying, a local artist and curator, said the local art community has celebrated the inclusion of many Hong Kong artists in what they feared would be a museum geared toward foreigners — but pointed out that the context of the work is not directly related to politics, and is more about land and space issues which Beijing is actively focusing on in Hong Kong.
It is a “safe conversation,” she said. Many Hong Kong artists, she said, have relished the opportunity to be included in M+, as it means more resources and recognition, but that the museum ultimately is not beholden to the local acts community — a microcosm of the broader issues facing Hong Kong under Beijing’s control.
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“They will only absorb us, until we fit into their system,” Wong said of M+. “To feel so happy about its opening feels a bit dangerous to me.”
Although few foreigners will visit the museum — Hong Kong still has pandemic quarantine regulations, including 14 to 21 days in a hotel, which has crippled tourism — local excitement is palpable. Ahead of the opening, 76,000 people reserved tickets to the museum, which is free for the first year.
Kacey Wong, the visual artist now in exile, says the museum is ultimately incomplete as a presentation of Hong Kong’s visual history and missed its chance to be truly artistically strong.
“We are not looking at a normal museum,” he said. “We are looking at a museum with part of its hands tied behind its back.”
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