Hong Kong’s cultural heritage is about more than the past – it may resolve the city’s identity crisis

It has taken Hong Kong many years to shake off its “cultural desert” label. But as the West Kowloon Cultural District slowly comes to life with the launch of the Xiqu Centre in December, to be followed by M+ and the Palace Museum in the coming years, Hong Kong is emerging as an international artistic and cultural powerhouse, with state-of-the-art venues and facilities rivalling anywhere else in the region. Now, no one can seriously doubt Hong Kong’s credentials as a cultural city. 

Hong Kong is already a major centre for the art trade: the combined pairing of Fine Arts Asia/Ink Asia and Arts Basel Hong Kong/Art Central anchors arts programmes in autumn and spring, plus major festivals such as Hong Kong Arts Festival, Le French May, Hong Kong Culture Festival, Festive Korea, Bellissima, Japan Autumn Festival, and many more, provide an abundance of cultural events that few cities in the world can rival.

At the same time, the established museums under the Leisure and Cultural Services Department – the Hong Kong Museum of Art, Hong Kong History Museum and Hong Kong Heritage Museum – are in the midst of significant upgrades. Once perceived as ultra-conservative and content to consume imported exhibitions, Hong Kong museums and curators are now taking the lead in the digital museological revolution in Asia, and offer new narratives on a range of Chinese and international subjects through our own unique interpretation.

The Monet exhibition at the Heritage Museum in 2016 – “Claude Monet: The Spirit of Place” – illustrates this new form of cultural engagement and collaboration between Hong Kong and international museums. A more recent example is “Digital Dunhuang – Tales of Heaven and Earth”, currently on display at the Heritage Museum, where the cultural legacy of the Mogao Grottos is presented and contextualised within a new museological framework that makes full use of new media and digital technologies.