How do you build an art scene from scratch? That question kept nagging at me as I digested the thousands of artworks, dozens of museums and galleries, and a pair of massive art fairs I experienced during a recent week in Hong Kong.
It was also the question Hong Kong was faced with after shaking off the official shackles of British colonialism back in 1997. It had a new identity to forge, and despite its gleaming skyscrapers, clean and quick public transit, and a booming financial sector pumping billions of dollars through the economy, it was an open secret that the arts and culture scene was lackluster.
Twenty-five years later, it glitters. Today, one of the defining visuals of the city’s literally pulsing skyline (every night at 8 pm, the facades of over 40 buildings are animated with synchronized lasers, LED lights, and music) is the illuminated 77,000 square foot screen of the M+ museum. The world-class contemporary arts museum, designed by Herzog & de Meuron, is just one of six major cultural institutions that have been built over the past decade on an emerald green peninsula jutting out into Victoria Harbor—the land itself a massive infill project, undertaken for the creation of the West Kowloon Cultural District (WestK). The $6.4 billion dollar development was an all-in gamble placed with the aim of propelling Hong Kong onto the list of destinations travellers flock to when they want to see the best art on the planet.
That was my intention when I, along with nearly 100,000 visitors, flooded Hong Kong in late March for Hong Kong Art Week, the centerpiece of which was the 13th installation of Art Basel Hong Kong. With seven days on the ground and a tightly packed itinerary of museums, galleries, auction houses, and even a walking street-art tour, I still managed to rack up an ever-growing list of places I missed and hope to see on my next visit.
“There's a long history around the decision to create a cultural district within a city that was primarily known as a financial hub,” says Doryun Chong, the artistic director and chief curator of M+. “Hong Kong has always been a very popular city for tourism, but the draw was usually for food and shopping and whatnot—not for arts and culture. So, more than 20 years ago, the Hong Kong government made a strategic decision, and this institution is the realization of the first phase of that project.”
Chong leads me through some of his favorite exhibitions and spaces at M+, including the marque Lee Bul retrospective, running through August 9, 2026. The South Korean artist builds byzantine sculptures that capture both the beauty and risk of structuring societies and building cities. Sparkling gems, shards of reflective glass, and twinkling lights hover above a ground covered in tar-like sludge, and crystallized castles sit atop complex and unsightly scaffolding, reflecting the reality that even our most impressive creations churn out waste and are built upon complicated foundations.
While the Lee Bul show requires paid admission ($24), the lower two levels of M+ are always free and open to the public. This includes a cinema showing art films, a restaurant, and a handful of galleries, one of which currently houses the mesmerizing exhibition “Zao Wou-Ki: Master Printmaker.” The artist lived his life between China, Hong Kong and Paris and practiced a groundbreaking form of lyrical abstractionism, executing both highly collectable oil paintings and a lesser known oeuvre of more accessible prints. This show highlights the latter body of work, as well as his influence in French literary circles, where he was sought out for his illustrations. “Everybody can just walk in and enjoy these open spaces, go down and see the exhibitions and just stroll around,” says Chong. “On weekend days, we get 14,000 to 15,000 people coming through this building.”
Within strolling distance of M+, accessed by winding walking paths flanked by expansive lawns dotted with picnickers, are the Hong Kong Palace Museum, the Xiqu Centre (for Cantonese opera and Chinese theatre), Freespace (experimental drama, music and dance), a 27-acre art park with a waterfront promenade, and a humming construction site for the forthcoming WestK Performing Arts Centre. Even though completion of the district is still years away, WestK already hosts more than 1,000 exhibitions, performances, programs and events each year.
And this was just the north side of the harbor. As I crisscrossed Central, the downtown waterfront section of Hong Kong Island and the site of the major art fairs, I kept passing another multi-block construction site wrapped in colorful scaffolding declaring the 2027 arrival of Central Yards. The $8 billion project is billed as a quarter-mile long “groundscaper”—a horizontal skyscraper—that will transform the waterfront and include a Broadway-caliber theater and a 160,000 square-foot sky garden.
From the moment my trip began, it was clear that Hong Kong has big head-of-the-class energy. I flew with Cathay Pacific, which was founded in Hong Kong back in 1946 and remains the official airline of the region. They basically offer mini studio apartments in the sky with their recently debuted business class Aria Suites, and the Hong Kong Airport is studded with nondescript doors leading to subterranean luxury lounges offering everything from neck massages to noodle bars to nap capsules. The view out my car window on the drive from the airport to my hotel was essentially a sizzle reel for the city—clusters of 100-story skyscrapers (HK has the most in the world), endless spans of majestic bridges (including the Hong Kong–Zhuhai–Macau Bridge, the world's longest sea-crossing bridge and tunnel system, spanning approximately 34 miles), and sprawling shipping ports lined with thousands of towering container cranes. I definitely knew this kid in high school.
The question of how far money and motivation can launch an ecosystem rooted in creativity is one I’ve been lugging around for a while. I live in San Francisco, a city where our once-thriving art scene is floundering, despite the city currently sloshing around in another wave of immense wealth. Hong Kong is a helpful case study in what happens when the development and support of art spaces are deemed just as important as the traditional triad of office, retail and residential.
For the past two decades, Hong Kong has made the tactical decision to invest heavily in the arts, and while the payoff may be most visible in the starchitect-designed museums, art malls and posh international art fairs, the smaller gallery scene, and most importantly, working artists and makers, have benefitted, too.
About a 20-minute train ride from Central is Wong Chuk Hang, a neighborhood of lower-slung industrial buildings stooped in the shadow of residential towers. Since 2010, galleries have been moving into the empty warehouses, attracting emerging artists and youthful crowds to events such as South Side Saturday, a monthly happening that encourages visitors to explore the labyrinthine buildings and wander the wide range of exhibitions. The most recent event featured 25 galleries, including Alisan Atilier, an outpost of Hong Kong’s oldest contemporary art gallery. Alisan Fine Arts was founded in 1981 and specializes in artists from the Chinese Diaspora. “When people fled China to escape war in the 40s, Hong Kong was a shelter and refuge of relative stability. A lot of artists actually thrived here,” says Yelin Qiu, Associate Director of Alisan Fine Arts, countering the notion that Hong Kong’s art scene was non-existent before the current renaissance.
Midsize galleries and local artists also stack the roster at Art Central, another cornerstone of Hong Kong Art Week. Launched in 2015, the fair offers a rich sense of discovery and collaboration. According to Art Central’s curator, Enoch Chang, this is the intention. “If you look at many major cultural capitals, like Berlin, Seoul, even Paris, the scene is actually supported by a lot of small to mid sized galleries. We want to offer them a space to grow and thrive.” The attendees at Art Central’s opening day veered young, casual, and creative. Artists hung around their pieces, eager to strike up conversation.
A similar crowd gathered within the open-air courtyard at PMQ (Police Married Quarters), a former apartment block for police officers that has been transformed into studios and retail spaces for over 100 local designers and artists. The humid spring air was thick with the scent of spray paint as at least a dozen street artists worked, painting the sides of box trucks, sketching on paper, or one, the French artist Theo Haggai, meticulously etching into clumps of clay. Later, he’ll wedge these miniature pieces into cracks in walls and sidewalks throughout the neighborhood. The artists and spectators were all here for HKWALLS, a local street art festival now in its 11th year.
Alexandra Unrein, a street art photographer and author, led me on a walking tour of the neighborhood where we passed more artists at work. The walls were colorful, cheerful and expertly executed, but I noted to Unrein that they seemed to lack the subversive energy I typically associate with street art. Unrein admitted as much, citing the diplomacy involved in brokering commissions between artists and building owners, but insisted artists will always find a way. “A piece might look very cute, but there might be a different layer to it that you will pick up on if you know the artist or know their work,” says Unrein. Either way, the practice of looking out for the freshly thrown up murals made me notice other, more subtle, unsanctioned works. I spotted a life-size concrete squirrel with a surveillance camera for a head perched on a set of steps.
Which brings me to the political climate. You can’t really talk about an art scene without getting a grasp on how free artists are to express themselves. While officially, the U.K.'s 1997 handoff agreement included 50 years of autonomous governance for Hong Kong, Beijing began exerting more control over the region in recent years. They did this most explicitly by passing the Hong Kong National Security Law in 2020, then sharpening its teeth in 2024 with stricter amendments banning “secession, subversion, terrorism, and collusion with foreign forces,” accompanied by the threat of life in prison. Censorship was the ghost I was subconsciously hunting throughout my trip, but it turned out to be hiding in plain sight. I didn’t find the paranoid creative chill I was expecting—artists do as artists do, creating ever-more creatively coded work to express their political and social concerns. Meanwhile, the blatantly censored works felt like they were benefitting from the “all press is good press” aphorism, including Ai Wei Wei’s Study of Perspective: Tian’anmen (1997), which depicts the Chinese dissident artist raising a middle finger at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. The photograph is part of the collection at M+, but it’s not on display—a decision that generated plenty of press, including an op-ed by Ai himself—and when it's searched on the museum’s comprehensive database a gray box with the text “no image available” appears. The blank space is stacked next to Ai’s two other photographs from the series, Study of Perspective: Bundeshaus Bern and Study of Perspective: White House, which depict the artist flipping off the two foreign seats of power and are shown in full, making the content of the missing image glaringly obvious. I tried to stay fired up about it, but then I clicked over to the “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” page on the White House website, where our own government plainly states its intention to “remove improper ideology” from the Smithsonian. A label mentioning Trump’s two impeachments apparently qualified as improper, as the museum had them removed in July of last year.
Another unsurprising critique of the nascent Hong Kong art scene is that it’s highly commercialized, and indeed the line between art and commerce was especially blurry from my hotel room window. It looked out at the K11 Art Musea—another piece of architectural eye candy I assumed was a museum but was actually a massive, high-end shopping mall. But as I entered the mall through Alexander McQueen, I was stopped in my tracks by an imposing canon-shaped sculpture dripping in red, white and blue urethane. It turned out to be a work by American artist Sterling Ruby, and a sharp critique of “social control, American domination and dysfunctional psychology,” with its title, CDCR, referencing the California state prison system. It was a jarring juxtaposition. Other artworks were displayed throughout the mall, and the sixth floor was dedicated to an Arts and Culture Centre—a quiet gallery space within a luxe cathedral of consumerism. Does placing a Basquiat next to a Birkin bag degrade the cultural value of the former? Or does the concept of infusing everyday spaces with fine art elevate our daily lives and democratize a scene that has been judged too rarified for its own good?
Either way, the trip left me with an insatiable curiosity about all of the above—a sure sign of a fulfilling artistic experience. I have been researching artists I encountered, digging into the tangled history of East-West relations, and sniffing around the politics and policies of our own art institutions back home. Ultimately, I’m left with a budding optimism that we might find creative, ambitious ways to invest in our own arts-filled future. I hear there’s a mall up for grabs…
Text by Erin Feher for The Unibrow
Here is a list of ten places to start your own exploration of Hong Kong’s art scene:
M+
Don’t miss Zao Wou-Ki’s dreamy prints. Grab a bite at the in-house restaurant, Agate, featuring classic Cantonese dishes.PMQ
Skip the megamalls and shop more than 100 local designers and artists instead.SoHo Street Art
Tackle the hills in SoHo with a walking tour of the spirited street art. You can wander on your own or book a knowledgeable guide.Tai Kwun
Another reimagined police property, these colonial monuments were revitalized in 2018 and now house a contemporary museum, shops, cafes, an open-air performance space and a collection of galleries, including one inside the former Victoria Prison.Chi Lin Nunnery
This tranquil Buddhist temple complex was built in the 1930s, and today its campus of elegant wooden architecture, huge gold icons, and serene lotus ponds are surrounded by skygrazing residential towers.Para Site
The 30-year old nonprofit contemporary art space is still as avant garde as when it first opened its doors in 1996. The anniversary exhibition “Site-seeing” revisits a show of the same name from the institution’s first year.Central Gallery District
What’s more Hong Kong than a skyscraper filled with art galleries? This vertical arts district is located within the steel-and-glass H Queen’s building. Heavyweight tenants include David Zwirner, Knotting Space and Tang Contemporary Art.Wong Chuk Hang
This unassuming industrial neighborhood has a new identity as a breeding ground for up-and-coming artists and galleries. Come by on the fourth Saturday of the month to experience the scene’s full glory.The Henderson
Get yourself inside this architectural marvel designed by Zaha Hadid any way you can. Fake your net worth and book a private viewing at Christie’s auction house, which occupies four floors, or book a table at the eye-popping Peridot, a lime colored Lite Brite of a cocktail bar that will make your jaw drop.Alisan Fine Arts
Staking claim to the “oldest gallery in Hong Kong” title, Alisan shows some of the most important 20th century artists from the Chinese diaspora. Seek out the contemporary scrolls of Fang Zhaoling.
