The best things to see and do during Hong Kong Arts Month

As is the case during Arts Month each year, local and international artists will gather to give our streets a colourful makeover with various street art pieces and murals. Last year’s edition featured artists such as Maye, Jaune, Michal Škapa, Hong Kong’s own elusive Lousy, and more. The striking murals along Tai Ping Shan’s Rich View Terrace and Wa In Fong in Sheung Wan created a few editions ago are still some of our favourite public art pieces in the city. The murals are available for all to view on our streets, but HKwalls usually also hosts a lineup of digital art displays, workshops, panel discussions, and other events, so keep an eye out!

Everyone’s favourite week-long celebration of storytelling returns to town, gathering emerging and established writers, as well as literature lovers everywhere, for a week of everything bookish. There will be 68 events in total, including fireside chats, literary lunches with authors, workshops, and family events. Some highlights of this year’s HKILF include Alka Joshi’s marquee event on her acclaimed Jaipur trilogy; a talk with Bernadine Evaristo, the Booker Prize-winning author of Girl, Woman, Other; a session with Asako Yuzuki on her thrilling novel Butter; and a writing workshop by Hong Kong author Sonia Leung.

Writer and comedian Jennifer Wong will join Ho Lee Fook’s executive chef ArChan Chan in a discussion on food, culture, and their respective works Chopsticks or Fork? and The Cantonese Cookbook. Meanwhile, Michelle Bang will present her debut book Sun & Ssukgat – The Korean Art of Self-Care, Wellness & Longevity, which draws on ancient Korean wellness traditions.

In celebration of Arts Month, the M+ museum will offer free admission to the public on March 9. Visitors will be able to access all general admission exhibitions for free and without prior registration. This includes M+ Sigg Collection: Another Story; Things, Spaces, Interactions; Making It Matters; Shanshui: Echoes and Signals; Yasumasa Morimura and Cindy Sherman: Masquerades, and more. There will also be free screening programmes on the day. To facilitate the flow of entry, visitors will only be allowed to enter via the Artist Square entrance – the museum will open from 10am to 6pm, but visitors will be stopped from joining the queue at 4pm, so time your trip well!

Their Complex Live! concert series may have gotten all the attention recently, what with international acts like NJZ (formerly NewJeans), Metro Boomin, and Zico being headliners, but don’t forget that ComplexCon is also a fair for fashion, sports, street culture, food, and art. Visit over the weekend to experience a festival that brings together creative minds that are shaping the latest global trends and fashion. It may not be the art that you’d expect at other Arts Month fairs, but fans of pop culture will enjoy the vibes at ComplexCon, as well as exclusive releases and merchandise that are only available at the Hong Kong event.

240 galleries from 42 countries and territories around the world will gather to showcase their best in contemporary art. 23 of these galleries are new to the fair, hailing from India, Australia, Kosovo, Guatemala, the US, the UK, Germany, and more. Over half of the participating galleries in Art Basel Hong Kong 2025 are from the Asia-Pacific region and, for the first time ever, the fair is also collaborating with local independent art institution Para Site to curate the film program titled ‘In Space, It’s Always Night’.

Look out for galleries with exhibitions focusing on a single artist, like P420’s retrospective of the German-Italian artist Irma Frank and her work intersecting writing and drawing; deep dives of themes and periods in art history in the Insights sector; and local galleries making their Art Basel debut, such as SC Gallery with Chow Chun-fai’s work on socio-political shifts from a Hong Kong perspective.

Art Central is back as one of Hong Kong’s Art Month highlights – and this year’s edition is particularly special as it is their 10th anniversary. Hit up their specially designed tent at Central Harbourfront to find a host of new programmes such as a sector dedicated to established artists born before 1970; Duo Projects, which pairs together the works of artists for deeper understanding on their art pieces; a specially curated host of video programmes, and brand-new lecture-performances. This year also sees the inclusion of some big names in the art world, such as Ay-O, Dean-E Mei, May Fung, and more.

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. 

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. 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.

Mixed media artist and celebrated designer of the luxury brand Chrome Hearts Joe Foti will be in Hong Kong for his first solo exhibition in town with over 180 of his works. From alien-themed pieces and odd bits and bobs that somehow fit when collaged together, to risqué birdhouses and penis paper weights, there is so much to tickle and amuse in this exhibition. Though described by the gallery as “one part fever dream, two parts nostalgia, and a whole load of ‘what the f*ck is that?’”, there’s no denying that Foti’s work is whimsical, absurd, and all the more appealing because of it.

The famous Musée d’Orsay and Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris have collaborated with the Hong Kong Museum of Art to present this special exhibition on two of the greatest masters of the Impressionist art movement: Paul Cézanne and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. 

This is the first large-scale exhibition of the two Impressionists in Hong Kong, showcasing 52 masterpieces on loan from France. See how the pair found innovative ways to reinvent the art of their time, how they viewed the world, and how they captured the rapidly changing times around them. Cézanne and Renoir were also longtime friends and likely influenced each other’s works, as well as later becoming beacons of inspiration for later painters such as Spanish surrealist master Pablo Picasso.

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.

Split into four sections that show how Picasso fits into four artist stereotypes – such as the genius in his self-mythologising works, and the outsider with how he consistently chose to upend artistic styles and traditions – this exhibition explores how Picasso became the quintessential modern 20th-century artist.