The top art exhibitions and displays to check out in Hong Kong

M+ will host the first full-scale retrospective of renowned Chinese-American architect Ieoh Ming Pei, his life, his philosophy, and his works, presented through various mediums. Better known as I. M. Pei, he is the mastermind designer behind some of the world’s most recognisable works of modernist architecture, including the glass-and-steel Louvre Pyramid, the Miho Museum in Shigaraki, and Hong Kong’s own Bank of China Tower. Sorted into six themes that place Pei’s architecture within sociocultural contexts, the exhibition will consist of over 300 items on display, most of which have never been exhibited before. Several international photographers have also been commissioned to photograph Pei’s buildings, and architectural models of some of his most significant projects have also been made. 

The exhibition will open on June 29 with a free public talk featuring Pei’s son, Sandi Li Chung Pei, as well as Pei’s close collaborators Calvin Tsao and Aslıhan Demirtaş – they will discuss the relevance and impact of Pei’s life and work across various cities. Tickets for this special exhibition are priced at $160, with concessions available. Ticket holders can also access all general admission exhibitions at M+ on the same day.

The Korean Cultural Center (KCC) introduces promising Korean artists to Hong Kong through its Korean Young Artists Series and, in its seventh year of running, has brought 14 of the latest works by three painters to be exhibited in PMQ.

Son Donghyun reinterprets East Asian art through contemporary Korean paintings; look out for his ‘Travelers among Mountains and Streams’, a 10-panel piece which works with various materials and techniques. Woo Jeongsu’s series ‘Three Devils by the Bedside’ is an allegory for the common modern ailments of depression and insomnia, while Key Minjung mostly works with glass and white rice paper.

First established in 2000, Fotan Open Studios is one of the city’s longest-running yearly visual arts events. This is a great opportunity to see behind the scenes of Hong Kong’s creative community, meet painters, sculptors, designers, and curators in person, and hear about their artistic inspirations for yourself. Fotan might be an industrial area that you don’t normally visit, but it’s well worth poking around to see what – or who – you might find. Since the studios involved are private workspaces, all visitors will need to register beforehand on the website, via email, or on WhatsApp.

Japanese artist Seiju Toda, one of the country’s leading art directors, is holding his first solo exhibition in Hong Kong. A lot of Japanese aesthetics and ideas of beauty hinge on minimalism, and in a similar vein, Toda’s body of work focuses on ‘subtraction’ and keeping things simple to allow room for viewers’ imagination. A hint of a fish swimming along a wooden edge, carefully concealed figures in alcoves, light hints of colours – even the very name of the exhibition which, apart from referencing an era in Japan’s middle age, literally means ‘peace’, evokes a sense of calm and quiet. This gallery is open by appointment from Monday to Friday, and available for drop-in visits on Saturdays.

Created by American architectural group Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Joyful Trees (Arbores Laetae), is an art project at Oil! featuring 16 Chinese Junipers, three of which are placed on turning planters at a 10-degree tilt. As the trees rotate, the movement channels a rhythmic rustle and evokes discourse about human’s role in nature from Anthropocene’s perspective. Planting a movable landscape, the installation also reinterprets nature as ever-changing and never static, creating an unusual artistic perspective.

The three-dimensional installation can be viewed from eye level on the ground; by the adjacent pedestrian ramp; on the footbridge across the site; from the gallery window in the Oi! Glassie building; or even from the skyscrapers above. 

Opening just ahead of the 75th anniversary of the founding of the PRC, the Hong Kong Palace Museum launches this special exhibition which explores the origins and development of Chinese civilisation through artefacts that span over 4,000 through history. The result of two decades of comprehensive national-level research and large-scale archaeological surveys, this exhibition showcases just under 110 treasures spanning the Neolithic period to the Xia dynasty loaned to Hong Kong from 14 major cultural institutions – including 16 grade-one national treasures. Almost all these loans are displayed in our city for the first time.

Among the jades, stone sculptures, ceramics, bone and bronze objects, and more, keep an eye out for a cloud-shaped jade plaque, a stone sculpture from the Shimao archaeological site, and a jade dragon from the Hongshan culture which is believed to be one of the earliest objects to bear the motif of a dragon in China.

Tickets to this exhibition are priced at $100 for adults, with concession prices available. There is also the Full Access Ticket which costs $180 and grants access to ‘The Adorned Body’ exhibition as well as other thematic exhibitions within HKPM on the same day.

After a year of preparation, Sun Museum finally opened the doors to its new Sai Ying Pun venue in October with its launch exhibition. Featuring 132 works by 92 Hong Kong artists, this show features the diversity and cultural traditions of our city’s arts scene through various mediums such as ink, charcoal, and mineral pigments to oils, watercolour, and marker pen drawings. This is a great chance to soak in the creativity behind local artistic minds and discover fantastic talents for yourself.

Step into the forests of Sumatra with this digital art exhibition by local creative team ALAN (Artists Who Love Animals and Nature), which integrates technology into art pieces that raise awareness of wildlife and their natural habitats. Working with Indonesian conservation organisations and creatives, as well as artists from the Netherlands, France, and the UK, they created nine large-scale interactive pieces across five zones, with a blend of mixed reality, augmented reality, and AI. See rare Sumatran flora and fauna, watch the rainforest transition from day to night, transform yourself into an orangutan, trek with critically endangered Sumatran elephants, and more. Entry to this special exhibition is free, but visitors must register with the NF Touch mobile app.

French cultural and educational organisation Visionairs is presenting its debut exhibition ‘Notre-Dame de Paris, The Augmented Exhibition’ at the West Kowloon Cultural District. Using both artefacts and immersive augmented reality (AR), this research-based project tells the story of the cathedral’s 850-year history and brings this French landmark to life for audiences.

Set to launch at the same time as the official reopening of Notre-Dame to the public in Paris, this exhibition transports visitors into a historically accurate recreation of the cathedral, spanning from its origins in the 12th century to the devastation of the 2019 fire and its subsequent restoration. Portable touch-screen tablets in 13 languages guide history lovers through 20 time portals to various grand events in time, such as King Henry VI’s wedding and the coronation of Napoleon.

Apart from a full-sized replica of one of Notre-Dame’s chimera statues and a sculpture of one of its rose windows which survived the fire, there will also be more virtual delights such as visitors being superimposed as the cathedral’s animal statues, as well as collecting stained glass shards in a digital treasure hunt.

From now until December 7, early-bird tickets are available at $248, while standard tickets will be available from December 8 onwards at $298. There will be concessions available, as well as discounts when purchasing in bundles of four or six.

Soluna Fine Art is hosting a group exhibition of works by contemporary artists around the world, serving as a capsule review of the gallery’s diverse shows over the years. Featured artists include Raffaele Cioffi and his luminescent paintings; Kim Duck-yong who used ancient wood as his canvas; Kim Young-hun who practises a traditional Korean painting technique called ‘hyuk-pil’; multi-media artist Javier León Pérez; and Hong Kong artist Rosalyn Ng with multidimensional layers of colours and textures in her imaginary scenes.

The Hong Kong Maritime Museum is presenting a collection of photographs taken in Hong Kong between the 1940s and 70s. These works by celebrated photographers Hedda Morrison, Brian Blake, and Edward Stokes capture Hong Kong’s harbour, port, shipping industry, maritime life, and boat people. In the 30 years after emerging from a long war, Hong Kong changed and grew into a vibrant city, and these photos show the spirit, grit, and energy of our people.

It’s particularly interesting to see slices of history like the dry dock at Taikoo Dockyard, which was able to take the world’s largest ships back then, the cityline of Victoria Harbour in the 70s, as well as glimpses of life like two boys paddling around on a makeshift raft. Entry to the Voyage Through Time exhibition is free, but access to the rest of the museum will cost $30.

Contemporary art centre Para Site is hosting a group exhibition inspired loosely by Wong Kar-wai’s 1997 film Happy Together, examining duality and the split between opposing pairs. The film’s protagonists try to repair their relationship by moving to Buenos Aires – the opposite side of the world and presented as the very antithesis of Hong Kong. 

Over 20 artists from Hong Kong, neighbouring countries, and Latin America have gathered with works that allude to Hong Kong’s clichéd descriptor as being ‘between east and west’ or ‘between tradition and modernity’. Between these two contrasting corners of the world, encounters both real and imagined are examined with a wide range of artistic practices.

This exhibition turns the spotlight on historical, social, and cultural connections between the Greater China area and the rest of the world – as well as how things might come together to form the queer happy-togetherness that Ho Po-wing and Lau Yiu-fai aim for in the film.

This exhibition features more than 40 haute couture pieces from the fashion artist Guo Pei, including Rihanna’s show-stopping yellow gown that she wore to the 2015 Met Gala. It marks the first major exhibition dedicated to this celebrated Chinese couture artist in East Asia. With a practice that has spanned almost four decades, Guo is among China’s first generation of contemporary fashion designers, with work reflecting Asian and global trends over the past century. You’ll often see traditional Chinese embroidery in her pieces, and this exhibition shows works inspired by fantasy dreamscapes, Eastern folklore, architecture, and space-time. The designer herself will hold a talk on September 21, and M+ will also host two screenings of Yellow Is Forbidden, which documents Guo’s journey in a predominantly Western field as she prepares a show for Paris Haute Couture Week.

Update, December 18:

The popular Twilight of the Warriors exhibition is wrapping up its first phase at Hong Kong International Airport and has now relocated to Kowloon City, the very neighbourhood in which the hit film is set. Until April 13, visit Airside in Kai Tak to see an expanded exhibition with all-new set-ups and photo spots that were not available at the airport pop-up.

Apart from the existing barbershop, tea stall, and other locations from the movie, five new sets have been added, including a comic stall, tailor shop, a tit da bone-setting clinic, a shoemaker’s shop, and a dental clinic. All the designs and props, down to the price tags on items, were modelled on historical pieces from Hong Kong in the 80s to fully immerse visitors in the bygone era of the Kowloon Walled City. The dim alleys and indoor locations have been integrated with sound effects and actors’ dialogues, so if you enjoyed Twilight of the Warriors, then this exhibition will be a real treat.

Spot Easter eggs hidden throughout the exhibition such as miniature models of the movie characters, and don’t miss the dining and retail stalls, where you can buy iconic dishes from Hong Kong food stalls served in nostalgic takeaway containers.

The Hong Kong Palace Museum (HKPM) is currently holding a joint exhibition with the Palace of Versailles with approximately 150 magnificent pieces to peruse. This is the first time that treasures from the Forbidden City and the Palace of Versailles – both World Heritage Sites – will be featured in one exhibition in Hong Kong.

With themes spanning culture, arts, science, technology, and beyond in the royal courts of France and China, visitors can expect to admire portraits, porcelain pieces, glassware, enamelware, textiles, books, scientific instruments, and more. Look out for first-grade national treasures from the Palace Museum in Beijing, such as a chrysanthemum teapot gifted to the Qianlong Emperor that was recently discovered to be made in France, and a quiver and bow case with French-made brocade. Highlights flown over from the Palace of Versailles include a perfume fountain – the only Chinese porcelain piece that Louis XV was known to have owned – and a portrait plaque of Qianlong that Louis XVI had displayed in his study.

Tickets for this special exhibition are priced at $150, with concessions available. Holders of HKPM’s Full Access Ticket can also access The Origins of Chinese Civilisation exhibition at a combined price of $180.

Visit this special exhibition at M+ to see more than 60 masterpieces by Spanish artist Pablo Picasso spanning from the late 1890s to the early 1970s. Co-curated with the Musée national Picasso-Paris (MnPP), which holds the largest repository of Picasso’s work in the world, this is the first time that pieces from the MnPP are being shown together with works from an Asian museum collection. By placing Picasso’s work in dialogue with Asian contemporary art – approximately 80 works by more than 20 Asian and Asian-diasporic artists – the master’s enduring influence on art to this day is highlighted. This exhibition will only be in town next spring, so check out for details and ticketing information.

This latest exhibition in the M+ Open Gallery examines the process of making things as a creative expression, and how this has a lasting impact on individuals, communities, and our ecosystems. Drawing from the works of the M+ Collections, visitors are invited into the inspirations and techniques behind the processing of conceptualising, research, design, and fabrication that go into the objects and architecture we see around us. Split into four sections, it covers the broad themes of ceramics with its layered history; innovative uses of materials like neon, resin, and bamboo, including a restored Hong Kong neon sign; how computing, machine learning, and AI have impacted the making process; and the effects of consumerism and mass production on contemporary society. Tickets for ‘Making It Matters’ cost $120, and allow same-day entry to the other paid exhibitions in M+.

This public art commission by Alicja Kwade is the Polish artist’s first site-specific installation in Hong Kong, and is available for viewing at Tai Kwun until 2026. Historically and socially contextualised objects make references to Tai Kwun history while exploring the passage of time and the present.

Six glass structures stand in conjunction with eight bronze cast Monobloc chairs that are each positioned dynamically with a boulder. Drawing on the history of Tai Kwun’s Prison Yard as a place of waiting and confinement, Kwade’s art reflects on the burdens that we carry, and the idea of waiting as a form of punishment in contemporary times, with glass structures representing invisible barriers in our lives.

M+ Museum’s new thematic exhibition aims to explore the connection between landscape and humanity in our post-industrial and increasingly virtual world. Literally translating to ‘mountain and water’, shanshui is a Chinese cultural concept that has inspired Asian ink paintings across millennia. Almost 130 works split into nine thematic sections will reimagine landscape through art, moving images, sound, design, architecture, and other large-scale mediums from a range of international artists, architects, and creators.