Will Hong Kong’s plan to showcase national achievements push Science Museum from prime spot and shut Heritage Museum?

A recent Hong Kong government proposal that could affect two museums has sparked controversy as the Science Museum would have to give up its prime spot in Tsim Sha Tsui, while the Heritage Museum’s future would be uncertain. The reason for the shake-up? A new museum celebrating national achievements is in the works. It will focus on history, the development of the Chinese Communist Party and the founding of China. National security, aerospace technology and Hong Kong-specific content are also expected to be showcased there. The new museum will take over the Science Museum’s premises in bustling Tsim Sha Tsui under the proposal, and it would move to the Sha Tin space of the Heritage Museum. The city’s culture minister Kevin Yeung Yun-hung earlier stressed that the shake-up was just an option as he explored the availability of other sites with the Development Bureau. He added that plans for all museums were considered individually and not linked to one another. But critics are concerned that this might spell the end of the Heritage Museum. The two museums are among 15 public museums managed by the Hong Kong government. Several others are run privately or by statutory bodies. The Post looks at the museum landscape and what the future might hold. Which museums attract the most visitors? The Science Museum was the city’s most popular in 2022-23, attracting more than 1.1 million visitors. It has been in its Tsim Sha Tsui location for 32 years. The Space Museum, with its distinctive egg-shaped dome, was the second most popular and pulled in 870,000 visitors. It has two permanent interactive exhibitions at the Hall of the Cosmos and Hall of Space Exploration, and a massive 23 metre (75ft) diameter hemispherical screen for documentary screenings. The nearby Museum of Art welcomed 584,000 visitors last year. It grew from the city’s first public museum and has a collection of more than 18,800 items from Chinese antiques, paintings and calligraphy to contemporary art. Some Hongkongers overreacting to proposed Science Museum relocation: culture chief Entry is free except for special exhibitions such as the present display of works from Italy’s Uffizi Galleries. Ticketed events cost HK$30 (US$4), with concessionary tickets at half that price. Also popular is the Oil Street Art Space, nestled in a historic building complex in North Point, which had 623,000 visitors in 2022-2023 for events related to design, architecture, contemporary art and new creative media. What’s at the two museums affected by the shake-up? The Science Museum is well-loved by children, parents and teachers for its interactive exhibits that allow young visitors to experience high technology close-up. It covers topics from geology and biodiversity to sound and speed. Its most eye-catching installation is a four-storey tall “energy machine” which shows how energy is converted through balls moving through its tracks. The Heritage Museum, established in 2000, had 451,000 visitors last year, drawn by exhibitions such as those about martial arts fiction writer Louis Cha Leung-yung, the late Cantopop legend Leslie Cheung Kwok-wing, and Cantonese opera. It has also been the venue for major international exhibitions, and showed works by French Impressionist Claude Monet in 2016, including his masterpiece, Waterlilies. There might not be a new Heritage Museum, as culture minister Yeung has said that a government review found that several existing exhibitions might be better suited for other institutions not yet completed. Hong Kong Science Museum better off relocating for expansion: culture minister Which are Hong Kong’s newest museums? The high-profile M+ museum opened in 2021 and the Palace Museum opened last year. Both are at the West Kowloon Cultural District and managed by a statutory body. M+, which has 33 galleries and sprawls across 65,000 sq m (699,654 sq ft), is focused on contemporary art and design, with its foundation collection of 1,510 artworks either sold or donated to it by Swiss collector and former diplomat Uli Sigg. It has one of the largest, most comprehensive collections of contemporary Chinese art in the world, spanning four decades from 1972 to 2012 and encompassing paintings, prints, sculpture, performance art, photography, and digital art. The Palace Museum showcases treasures from the Palace Museum in Beijing. Between its opening in 2022 and July this year, it had five rotations of items on loan from the national capital. The museum has collaborated with top global museums including the Louvre in Paris. It is now showing 52 paintings by European artists from the collection of the National Gallery in London. Admission for adults is HK$120 to M+ and HK$60 at the Palace Museum, with concession tickets for both at half price. Special exhibitions are priced separately. Which are the better-known private museums? The Hong Kong Maritime Museum at Central Pier 8 covers trade and maritime activity in the Pearl River Delta and was started by the Hong Kong Shipowners Association. The museum said it attracted 100,000 visitors a year. Among more than 1,100 objects displayed in 13 galleries is a large scroll painting of the bustling foreign trade port of Guangzhou in the 18th century. The Liang Yi Museum on busy Hollywood Road in Central has the Chinese antique furniture collection of former banker and investment company chief Peter Fung Yiu-fai. His centuries-old chairs, tables, cabinets and bedframes are on display at a building with four floors of former retail and warehousing space in the heart of the city’s antique trading hub. The self-funded Hong Kong News Expo in a heritage building in Sheung Wan documents the development of the news media industry in the city. The expo marked its fifth anniversary and is run by a non-profit and entry is free of charge. Hong Kong culture chief not ruling out arts hub as possible site for new museum Are museums popular in Hong Kong? There are figures to rank the city’s museums by the number of visitors, but Chinese University of Hong Kong adjunct associate professor Oscar Ho Hing-kay, who specialises in museum management, said it was not fair to judge museums only by the numbers passing through their doors. “The popularity of a museum depends on many elements, including location, convenience for transport, frequency of special exhibitions, budget for publicity and organisation of special activities, such as school tours,” Ho, who is also an art critic, explained. “Normally, big museums tend to have more visitors as they have the budget and human resources to organise more events and bring in expensive exhibitions.” Hong Kong museum exhibition on nation’s space programme to feature rare artefacts Have museums in Hong Kong faced controversy? Before M+ opened in 2021, there was controversy over whether it would display works by dissident artists such as Ai Weiwei, Zhang Wei and Zhou Xiaohu. Ai’s Study of Perspective – Tian’anmen (1997), which shows a photograph of the artist raising his middle finger against the backdrop of the Gate of Heavenly Peace in the heart of Beijing, has become a hot potato. The work has not been exhibited and an image of it has been removed from the online catalogue, but other works by Ai have been displayed. Tiananmen vigil group fined for operating June 4 museum without licence The June 4 museum, which opened in 2014, was run by the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China. The alliance also organised an annual vigil in the city’s Victoria Park on the anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown in Beijing before the national security law was imposed by Beijing in 2020. The museum had photographs, a model of Tiananmen Square and accounts of the 1989 student-let protests. But after the national security law was imposed, the museum announced that it would close temporarily after a licensing complaint. It has not reopened. Three alliance leaders were jailed earlier this year in a national security-related case.