Location

SUHANYA RAFFEL

Executive Director, M+ Museum

Hong Kong, China

OBJECTS ARE FULL OF OPINIONS

The future history of the art museum will to a significant degree be written in Asia. Few institutions will be more pivotal to that story than the M+ Museum, a brand-new center for visual culture opening in 2021 in Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District, in a towering edifice designed by the Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron. The preparations are being led by Sri Lanka–born Suhanya Raffel, who took the helm of M+ after serving in curatorial and management roles at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, and the Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA), Brisbane, Australia, where she helped to establish the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art. Since 2016, Raffel has assembled a large and diverse international team to steward M+ Museum’s growing collection, which is anchored by 1,500 works of Chinese contemporary art donated by Swiss businessman, diplomat, and art collector Uli Sigg. We spoke in June 2020, as Hong Kong was emerging from the Covid-19 pandemic and a sustained period of political strife.

András Szántó We’re in a tumultuous moment, and nowhere more so than Hong Kong. Your museum plans to open in March 2021. How has this time tested your ideas about museums?

SUHANYA RAFFEL I have been thinking a lot about what it means to open a new museum in Hong Kong during a time when the world is changing so profoundly. I think change is actually a good thing. It can bring a level of energy and dynamism that is bracing but important. Change is part of the DNA of life. Change is learning. Change is surviving. So in a situation of intense change in Hong Kong, there is opportunity.

The M+ Museum collections are unique to Hong Kong and Asia. We are building an institution based on visual culture. What does visual culture mean for us? Structurally, it is bringing in collections of design, architecture, moving image, and visual art. Hong Kong has an important history of film, especially in relation to martial-arts cinema, a sophisticated design culture, fashion, and music, often expressed as cross-disciplinary interests. We also see a coherent radical ink practice that intersects with the deep history of ink within East Asian culture. The city is an international cosmopolitan center for the exchange of ideas. M+ is more than a museum of art.

When we look at what is happening in the world today in relation to diversity and voices that need to be heard, I feel as if our institution already embodies a reality that is being sought in other places. We are a pan-Asian workforce, with more than 75 percent of our staff from Hong Kong, working with colleagues from Europe, North America, Australia, and Asia. All of us have our own DNA as individuals. For example, I am Sri Lankan, Australian, now living in Hong Kong. This heterogeneity is incredibly powerful for a new institution in Hong Kong.

You previously served in various roles in Australia. You led the Asia Pacific Triennial in the Queensland Art Gallery. You organized exhibitions in several museums worldwide. How have those experiences shaped the ideas you are testing out for M+?

Crucially. Pivotally. Fundamentally. They underscore the point of view that I bring to M+. When I began working at the Queensland Art Gallery, in the early 1990s, we were embarking on the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art. Over twenty years, we built a collection of contemporary Asian and Pacific art, when no other institution was collecting contemporary art from that region. It was a blank page. The then-director, Doug Hall, established the triennial as a strategic means of thinking about what could distinguish us. He thought about the region, the neighborhood, Australia’s demographics, its history of migration, and its relationship to China and Japan, the long history of exchanges across the Pacific region, which had never been spoken about within the formal canons of art history as established in the West.

I was very young when I joined this museum, and at that time I recall that we had a sense of adventure, as we really had nothing to lose. We roamed far and wide in our thinking, mirrored in the geography we covered. We were unfettered in where our advice came from: architects, filmmakers, fashion designers, performers, curators, and academics—we worked with individuals who had established interests in the places we, too, were interested in. At the time, this methodology was groundbreaking and unusual. Over the course of the twenty years from the early 1990s, a city of two million people that was frankly regional became the home to a museum that was a recognized global contender. The Queensland Art Gallery launched a cohort of professionals who are now dispersed around the world, contributing to the much-needed expanded dialogues in museums today.

As you note, M+ has been conceived as a center for contemporary culture. What will be its most important contribution to society, particularly in Hong Kong?

Hong Kong is an international financial center and business hub. The ambition to build a cultural capital is what initiated the West Kowloon Cultural District, in which M+ sits as a founding institution. There are other institutions devoted to the performing arts: the Xiqu Centre, for Chinese opera; Freespace, for contemporary music and jazz; the Lyric, for dance and drama, which will open two years after us. M+ is pivotal, as it establishes the first museum of twentieth- and twenty-first-century visual culture in Hong Kong, and in Asia.

What will it bring to Hong Kong? In Asia, we need to establish institutions of equivalence to those in Europe such as the Centre Pompidou in Paris, or those in the USA such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York. I firmly believe that the twenty-first century will be Asia-centered. We need to ensure that we have substantial public institutions in the region that own and deliver the stories and voices from our part of the world: to talk about our histories, our creative ideas and contributions, that are influencing global conversations. We need institutions of substance to ensure that these voices are recognized, along with the deep, complex roots that sustain and provide perspective. Hong Kong is well placed to do this, because it is a nodal point through which so many paths cross.

Can you set M+ against this evolving landscape of institutions in the Southern Hemisphere in general, and Asia in particular? Which parts of the Western museum model translate and which ones do not?

The institutional-structural model itself is the most immediate translation. A museum structured with a collection underpinned with policy, with proper collection management, with established due diligence around intellectual property, with best practice around governance, a museum board—those are important structural tools that we have embraced. That translates well. And it is an important translation, because it is about recognition. Our peers recognize the best practice being embedded into the institution. Governance is an important aspect of our museum’s ability to speak with academic and scholarly independence.

What doesn’t always translate—and what is often an irritation—are the frequent questions about the ability of this institution, M+, or any museum in this part of the world, to actually express that scholarly, artistic, independent voice. What is happening right now in the United States, with the public protests erupting about race relations, is evidence that such independence is not always to be assumed elsewhere. Black, or for that matter, Asian histories and Indigenous histories that are deeply embedded in the history of the USA have now been recognized as they should long have been. Museums now have to start recalibrating to include these multiple histories.

What have we got here at M+, in this part of the world? Our opportunity is that we have not been burdened with collections and assumptions in the way these more established institutions have been formed, and they now have to carry forward and redress those histories. I don’t have that particular burden to carry. That is enabling.

The word “globalization” is unavoidable in these conversations. What does it mean to you?

A double-edged sword. On the one hand it brings diversity to the forefront. As a species, we are restless. We move. We have always been driven by need or curiosity, or both. That need to journey and explore runs deep across centuries. We have always been global creatures. It is the volume in which that globalization now takes place that distinguishes the twenty-first century. The speed, the numbers, and the economics that support the possibility for so many to move around.

The other side of the globalization debate is the sense that somehow everything is going to be the same—that each institution will somehow mirror the other. I don’t believe this will be the case. Our survival is dependent on our not being the same. As soon as we are too much the same, we wither. The challenge is making that difference a positive thing, rather than descending into tribalism and violence.

Up till now, museums were primarily influenced by European and North American models. What will be the biggest...