“With the physical infrastructure in place, namely the contemporary visual culture M+, the Hong Kong Palace Museum, as well as the Xiqu Centre, Hong Kong’s arts and cultural development has entered a ‘harvesting period’,” he told the Post on Tuesday.

“I have full confidence that we can serve as an international platform for the mainland to facilitate exchanges between East and West in arts and cultural dimensions.”

About 1,000 people have been invited to the summit, which will have five panel discussions, punctuated by networking opportunities including a welcome dinner at the Hong Kong Palace Museum on Sunday and a lavish party at M+ on Monday evening with live performances and drinks.

Participants include museum professionals, academics, government representatives, artists, representatives of art and cultural groups and sponsors.

The authority will sign memorandums of understanding (MOU) with 20 institutions on areas of collaboration such as exhibitions, collection sharing, conservation, digitalisation and scientific research, as well as educational and exchange programmes for art administrators and artists.

Tang said the deals marked an important milestone for the West Kowloon arts hub as it embarked on new partnerships and development opportunities globally.

West Kowloon museums set the stage

Many of the overseas museum chiefs attending the summit have not been to Hong Kong before, not least because the city did not previously have major cultural landmarks to match the global institutions.

The Palace Museum created a new showcase for Chinese treasures never displayed outside the mainland before.

For example, the “Gazing at Sanxingdui: new archaeological discoveries in Sichuan” exhibition, which ended in January, had 55 items excavated between 2020 and 2022 and brought out of Sichuan province for the first time, including 23 deemed grade-one national treasures.

The artefacts include bronze heads with exaggerated facial expressions and eye- and dragon-shaped objects believed to be from the ancient Shu civilisation, dating back at least 3,000 years ago.

A current Palace Museum exhibition on Yuan Ming Yuan, or the Old Summer Palace in the Qing dynasty, has more than 190 exhibits associated with the historic site that was burned down in 1860 during the second opium war by British and French troops.

They include paintings, calligraphy, ceramics, architectural models, drawings and prints shown in Hong Kong for the first time.

Du Haijiang, deputy director of Beijing’s Palace Museum, said the show not only built cultural bonds between the capital and Hong Kong, but also promoted the transformation and development of traditional Chinese cultural heritage.

“If we invited guests over with nothing tangible to see, that would not be very substantial. Now the timing is ripe, especially after the pandemic and with the hardware all up and running,” he said.

Ng said the summit was also a result of years of efforts in building close ties between Hong Kong and international cultural institutions.

The Hong Kong government held three smaller-scale museum summits in 2017, 2019 and last year. Some speakers from those meetings who will be at this month’s summit include Tim Reeve from the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and Laurent Salome from France’s National Museum of the Palaces of Versailles and Trianon.

Unlike the museum meetings, the International Cultural Summit will include other artistic collaborations in areas such as film, with the Asian Film Archive in Singapore, conservation with the Getty Conservation Institute in the US, and performing arts with the mainland’s China Theatre Association.

“Those who are visiting can take home what they saw in Hong Kong, like when we hosted the Global Financial Leaders’ Investment Summit and invited top bankers to the city, they can see with their own eyes what Hong Kong is about,” Ng said.

He added that making Hong Kong a cultural centre opened another way for the city to connect China with the world, besides its existing status as an international financial hub and traditional bridge to the mainland.

Its location – easily accessible from across Asia by a three- to five-hour flight – contributed to it being a place where cultures met, he said.

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Arts and culture defy geopolitics?

“Although the US and the West are politically hostile towards Hong Kong with threats of sanctions, collaborations in arts and culture have not faced too many obstacles,” he said.

Tense relations aside, he said, China was pushing for people-to-people diplomacy, or second-track diplomacy, and the West did not seem very resistant.

“This area of collaboration could be a breakthrough especially when the exchange route in the political arena has proven to be difficult. It might be more beneficial to work on areas deemed less politically sensitive,” he said.

From Beijing’s perspective, Hong Kong could facilitate the exchange between the mainland and the world by hosting such international gatherings.

“China wants to develop its soft power too, to enhance others’ understanding and appreciation of Chinese culture,” he said.

“To enable exchanges at international events, it is a prerequisite to also invite mainland academics and officials, not only those from overseas. Only then can we achieve the goal of cultural exchange.”

However, he cautioned that there could be pitfalls with these collaborations.

“Art and culture can be very broad – which can be politicised or might even touch on national security issues. When these activities are organised, the political connotations need to be minimised,” he said.

Event organisers should anticipate potential issues to avoid any political controversy that could become an international hot potato, he said.

“Before that, we had members of the opposition who would make use of the chance to smear Hong Kong and protest when the international community was in town. Now, under a new political environment, we don’t need to worry about people causing havoc,” he said.

The Chinese University of Hong Kong’s Professor Oscar Ho Hing-kay, who specialises in museum management and was a member of the Museum Advisory Group for the West Kowloon Cultural District, questioned the contribution of prestigious foreign institutions to the city’s art scene.

He said “big names would come and go as you pay”, but asked how they helped to boost the local arts scene and contribute to the development of Hong Kong’s cultural landscape.

“Abu Dhabi has put in tons of money, even bringing in the Louvre. Does that make the city an arts centre? If you are willing to pay, people will come, it will benefit some locals, especially the officials who write reports about what they have done.”

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Ho, who is not attending the summit, said a lot of money would be spent on future collaborations with possibly millions of dollars going to loan fees, transport and insurance when priceless works from around the world were brought to Hong Kong.

He said bringing in masterpieces by artists such as Vincent van Gogh – as the Palace Museum has in an ongoing exhibition – drew attention, but was also an expensive endeavour.

“For Hongkongers, after they have seen a van Gogh, will they go to museums more often, even when there are no expensive shows?” he said.

To be a true culture hub, he said, the city needed trained arts and culture practitioners, a system for continuous education, development of a healthy ecosystem, total artistic freedom and acknowledgement of diversity.

“People who want to see Western masterpieces will go to the West. When they come to Hong Kong, they want to see Hong Kong culture.”

John Batten, a Hong Kong-based art critic and an examiner for the Arts Development Council, agreed with Ho that bringing in big names alone would not benefit the local art scene, but said a degree of reciprocity would help.

“What’s the point of the MOUs? Surely, it must be for us, Hong Kong, to have some access to these places,” he said, adding the city was able to bring in international exhibitions even before this summit.

“What can we offer? We have good collections of Chinese antiquities, for example. For us to really benefit, we need to see some of our artists being seen overseas. They don’t have to be huge exhibitions,” he said.

Signing so many MOUs on this scale could also help Hong Kong build up databases of experts around the world and bring about cross-fertilisation of views and expertise.

Batten disagreed with Ho that Hongkongers only visited museums for big names, saying people were excited to attend other exhibitions too.

“They want to learn something. They go because they know someone has curated or organised it, and it should be good,” he said.

Among the international participants at the summit is Dr Thomas P. Campbell, director and chief executive officer of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

He said the meeting provided an opportunity for his museums to strengthen their relationships across the Pacific Rim, and be part of the conversation on the future of culture.

Hong Kong invites overseas museum, arts leaders to summit to foster cooperation

Campbell, who will be speaking at a panel on the “Promise of Digital”, said: “As rapid advancements in technology generate both profound possibilities and complex questions for the cultural sector, [the summit] offers a welcome opportunity for meaningful international exchange on the evolving landscape in which we are all operating.”

Dr Miguel Falomir, director of Spain’s Prado Museum in Madrid, who will be signing an MOU and speaking at the panel on “Rethinking Museum Interpretation in a Global Context”, said: “I believe this kind of summit is necessary and useful to build bridges and to establish ties with cultural institutions worldwide.”

He said he hoped to share the legacy of the Prado’s extensive collection of 16th and 17th-century European paintings with the international audience.

Also in Hong Kong for the summit is Dr Wang Chunfa, director of the National Museum of China, which he described as the country’s foremost institution of history, culture and art.

“I look forward to meeting colleagues and experts from across the globe and discussing the shared challenges and new trends by museums globally, as well as diving deeper into how museums can play a greater role in exchanges and mutual understanding between China and the rest of the world,” he said.