February 25, 2021

A digital rendering of M+ Museum. Image: Herzog & de Meuron and the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority. 

Following William and Lavina Lim's donation of nearly 100 artworks to M+, the museum has received another significant donation—this time by Hallam Chow, a prominent Hong Kong collector and long-time supporter of the museum. The pieces date from the 1990s to the 2010s, and will help shape the institution’s collection of contemporary Asian art. Among the works in the donation are works by seven Japanese artists and collectives, including Aida Makoto, Chim↑Pom, Konoike Tomoko, Odani Motohiko, and Shioyasu Tomoko. Other artists represented in the group of gifted works are Montien Boonma, Lee Bul, Liang Yuanwei, Liu Wei, and Adrian Wong.

"My hope for M+ is for it to become an international art institution that respects, nurtures and cultivates inter-collaboration and exchange between and among the Asian countries including regions that may have been overlooked and under-represented in the global art scene including South East Asia and Japan (beyond Gutai artists, Murakami, Nara and Kusama)," says Chow.

Doryun Chong, deputy director of M+’s curatorial department and chief curator at the museum, said in a statement that the gift “greatly enhances the museum’s ability to create even more inventive and thought-provoking narratives about how contemporary art has made critical contributions to visual culture in Asia, which now has global resonances.”

Chow’s donation is not the only significant gift that the M+ Museum has received in recent months. In December, the institution announced that it had been given key artworks from Hong Kong–based collectors William and Lavina Lim. The Lims donated 90 pieces from their holdings, which they call the Living Collection, to M+, the contemporary art and design museum scheduled to open in late 2021 at the West Kowloon Cultural District. Measuring in at nearly 700,000 sq ft, the Herzog & de Meuron-designed M+ will be one of the largest art museums in the world and is already being compared to London’s Tate Modern and New York’s Museum of Modern Art. “I really hope M+ will be a place to put children and the general public in closer touch with art,” says William. “I love it when you’re in a museum that feels welcoming and not intimidating, when people are sitting on the ground, people are sketching, people are talking about art. That’s what we hope M+ will be.”

M+ is a museum dedicated to collecting, exhibiting, and interpreting visual art, design and architecture, moving image, and Hong Kong visual culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.