Hong Kong officials and leaders from the world’s top cultural organizations pose for a group photo at the first Hong Kong International Cultural Summit on March 25, 2024. (PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)
The West Kowloon Cultural District Authority is hosting Hong Kong’s largest-ever international cultural conference, with more than 1,000 personalities drawn from various creative fields the world over in attendance.
The Hong Kong International Cultural Summit 2024 kicked off on Sunday, with 21 memorandums of understanding signed between directors of the West Kowloon Cultural District facilities — Hong Kong Palace Museum director Louis Ng Chi-wa, M+ Museum Director Suhanya Raffel, and Paul Tam, the executive director of the district’s performing arts division — and representatives of some of the world’s most influential and prestigious institutions tasked with interpreting and preserving our cultural inheritage.
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Among the signatories, Shaika Al-Nassr, director of the Museum of Islamic Art (MIA) in Doha, Qatar, sealed her institute’s agreements with both the HKPM and M+. Two major exhibitions will travel beyond their home countries as a result of these collaborations. The HKPM will play host to an exhibition on ancient Islamic carpets, textiles and other artifacts that originated at the MIA.
“Beginning with the Timurid period in Iran and Central Asia (1370-1507), the exhibition shows the continuation of artistic practices shared amongst succeeding and neighboring dynasties, namely the Safavids in Iran (1501-1736), the Ottomans in Turkey (1299-1923) and the Mughals in India (1526-1857),” Al-Nassr said.
In its turn, the MIA will see the I. M. Pei: Life is Architecture exhibition, a retrospective show of milestone works by the Chinese-born master architect, due to open at M+ in June, gracing its galleries in 2026.
“This exhibition is special to us, since Pei designed the MIA,” said the museum’s director.
The other major exhibition exchange resulting from an MOU is one on the life and times of the 20th-century modernist giant Pablo Picasso, coming up at M+ in March 2025.
Cecile Debray, president of the Musee National Picasso-Paris, said that the M+ iteration is going to be significantly different from the much-lauded version her museum had presented at the UCCA in Beijing in 2019, this time tracing Picasso’s evolution as an artist over a much wider time span.
Picasso for Asia: A Conversation at M+ will feature over 60 masterpieces by the master from the collection of Musee National Picasso-Paris, “opening up a broad period from the late 19th century to the 1970s, and presenting a very wide range of works from when the artist was a teenager to those he produced some time before his death,” Debray said.
In keeping with M+’s curatorial approach, Picasso’s works will appear in dialogue with “around 80 works by more than 20 Asian and Asian-diasporic artists, born and active from the early 20th century to the present, drawn from the M+ Collections”.
Thomas Learner, head of science at the Getty Conservation Institute (GCI) in Los Angeles, signed an MOU with M+. The art and artifacts in M+’s collection — made in the 20th and 21st centuries — are relatively new by museum standards. However, as Learner said, the identification and characterization of new materials, especially synthetic paints and plastics, are no less challenging than dealing with antiquities and have to be conducted with a precision that his colleagues are particularly adept at.
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“We’ve been active in developing networks and dialogues within the field to advance our practice on navigating working with living artists, as well as the often-impossible task of stopping any kind of deterioration in their works, especially when very unstable materials are used,” Learner said.
“As M+ will know from collecting and exhibiting contemporary artworks, hugely challenging expectations are often placed on conservators to keep the collection authentic, exhibitable and stable, and it helps enormously to have an international network as a partner while working through specific works of art or thinking more broadly about the whole collection.”
Though the specific areas of GCI’s cooperation with M+ are yet to be identified, Learner said that resource sharing and research-related collaborations are likely to figure on the list.
“We could be sharing scientific instruments in our science labs, creating staff exchanges, or developing workshops and seminars,” he adds.
The M+ and GCI are similarly aligned in their approach to addressing the environmental impact of art. “The GCI has been very active in exploring tools to help institutions make decisions that are appropriate to their mission and location, and M+ has been very engaged in these discussions too,” Learner said.
