The Collector | Should Asia’s art museums embrace cross-border exchanges and tailored exhibitions?

The Hong Kong Museum of Art makes a welcome return, but is its first exhibition too generic for the local audience?

Budi Tek, owner of Shanghai’s private Yuz Museum, talks about its collaboration with Lacma and Qatar Museums

Reading Time:3 minutes

Why you can trust SCMP

Works by British artists John Constable and J.M.W. Turner are on show at the recently reopened Hong Kong Museum of Art as part of the ‘A Sense of Place: From Turner to Hockney’ exhibition. Photo: Jonathan Wong

Enid Tsui

Published: 11:30am, 14 Dec 2019Updated: 11:30am, 14 Dec 2019

The reopening of the Hong Kong Museum of Art, in Tsim Sha Tsui, puts an end to a long spell of art-history deprivation in a culturally rich city of 7.4 million people. There were plenty of art shows on while the museum went through a four-year refurbishment, but they were piecemeal and dominated by contemporary works.

The museum, where most exhibitions are free, has been so popular since it reopened recently that visitors are being asked to book a time slot online. It’s worth it, though, if you are at all interested in the history of Hong Kong. This stunning harbour-side venue – with its new balconies, big windows, restaurants and nicer exterior – shows the local developments of the past two centuries reflected through art.

An additional 40 per cent of exhibition space houses an extensive display of tycoon Paul Chater’s storied collection of local landscapes, a well curated introduction to the history of modern Hong Kong art, and new contemporary pieces commissioned to respond to highlights in the museum’s permanent collection.

The opening special exhibition, “A Sense of Place: From Turner to Hockney”, is a large-scale presentation of 76 works on loan from the Tate in Britain. The title seems a little ironic, because there is no sense of where the exhibition is being shown or its intended audience.

The Hong Kong Museum of Art, in Tsim Sha Tsui. Photo: Jonathan Wong

Don’t get me wrong: the juxtaposition of works by John Constable (1776-1837) and J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851) is fascinating, and the massive collage by David Hockney is a great way of updating British landscapes. Maybe it is because I had recently heard the British Museum’s head of research, Jeremy Hill, address last month’s Museum Summit, in Hong Kong, about creating bespoke exhibitions with a specific audience in mind, instead of pre-packaged, made-for-touring mega shows such as the popular “A History of the World in 100 Objects”.