The long-awaited Museum of Visual Culture M + has 33 galleries, which house over 1,500 exhibits related to painting, design, architecture, is facing its biggest challenge – the threat of censorship
The new ultra-modern museum of visual culture M + from November 12 receives visitors in Hong Kong, world agencies reported.
In the first year the institution will work for free.
The museum is located on the shores of the Victoria Strait in the mainland near the tallest 118-storey skyscraper of the International Trade Center (ICC).
It becomes an important part of the emerging West Kowloon Cultural Center, which will be the largest in Asia and will include 17 different sites.
The museum’s 33 galleries house 1,500 exhibits related to painting, design and architecture. Visitors can see various installations as well as high-tech moving images. The total exhibition area is 17,000 square meters.
Construction of the museum began in 2012 and took nine years. The exact amount for its construction is not disclosed, but it is known that it exceeds the initial budget of 5.9 billion Hong Kong dollars (760 million USD).
The local government warned that the exhibits in the new museum should not have an anti-Chinese tone and violate the new law on the protection of national security in Hong Kong, adopted last summer at the initiative of Beijing. This is especially true of individual works by the famous Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei.
For this reason, visitors will not be able to see the artist’s “Study of Perspective” series of photographs, in which he shows his middle finger in front of various institutions around the world, including the White House and the Reichstag in Berlin, and Tiananmen Square in Beijing.
“When the museum opened on Friday, the biggest challenge before it materialized, and that was the threat of censorship from the Chinese Communist Party,” world media commented.
