New film on M+’s giant screen asks Hongkongers to confront their imperial past

As the humidity settles over Hong Kong, a spectral spring mist veils Victoria Harbour. Yet, in the evenings, the luminous hand-drawn vision of Shahzia Sikander pierces the haze from the 110-metre-wide (328ft) LED facade of the M+ museum.

Her nine-minute animation, 3 to 12 Nautical Miles (2026) – co-commissioned by M+ and Art Basel – stands as a monumental reflection on the mercantile ghosts embedded in the city.

Sikander, a Pakistani-American winner of the MacArthur Fellowship, who last had an exhibition in Hong Kong in 2016, has long been celebrated for her ability to harness the allure of traditional Mughal miniature painting to challenge patriarchal, Western-dominated narratives of the past and to open up new ways of thinking about the world today.

With this work that, as she says, asserts itself in the middle of the city, she is asking Hong Kong to confront the aftershocks of imperial expansion, specifically the opium trade that fuelled the early infrastructure and family fortunes of Hong Kong, and how a postcolonial society may position itself in the shadow of past imperial ghosts.

The title itself marks an example of the constant contestation of borders and geopolitical balance of power: the transition from the historical concept of a nation’s territorial waters extending three nautical miles from its shores – defined by the reach of a cannon – to the modern 12-nautical-mile boundary.

The work has certainly arrived at a moment of profound geopolitical flux.