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G+, the world's most controversial new art gallery, opens

Jacques Herzog has designed the Tate Modern in London and the Birds Nest in Beijing, but this may be his boldest project yet.

On what is among the near expensive pieces of country in the world, above the tunnels that once ferried protesters from Kowloon to Sunny Bay, sits Hong Kong's newest billion-dollar icon.

The new M+ gallery in Hong Kong. Credit:Virgile Simon Bertrand

Chiliad+, Asia's largest gallery, opens on Friday in the eye of a political storm over censorship and art, representing a city that has changed across recognition since the first plans were drawn up about a decade ago.

"Information technology is non an innocent piece of land," says Herzog from his studio in Basel, Switzerland, referring to the rail tunnels that ran underneath the reclaimed world in W Kowloon that now form a key function of the gallery.

"It's like the back of a big animate being that we constitute on the ground. It's a real blood vessel."

The Pritzker Prize-winning architect – the manufacture'south highest honor – might too be talking about the creative and political veins pulsing through the entire ex-British colony.

The former autonomous enclave, once a breastwork for the competition of ideas, has had its liberal streak smothered clandestine past national security laws that take censored films critical of China, forced children to be taught through national-security-themed puzzles and pro-Beijing newspapers to accuse art collectives of "anti-regime" activities.

Herzog, who co-founded the house Herzog & de Meuron, is aware of the controversial context in which his 90-metre-tall, 65,000-square-metre beast is opening.

Rather than hibernate the track tunnels, he embraced them. They add a gritty historical and archaeological dimension to a site otherwise filled with air, green infinite and a giant screen larger than the Sydney Opera Business firm that will project fine art over Hong Kong Harbour.

"Architecture is always very political, simply it'due south not ideologically political. Architects cannot be activists," he tells The Sydney Morning Herald and The Historic period.

Inside the Thou+ edifice in Hong Kong. Credit:Virgile Simon Bertrand

"That's an impossibility as an architect. If you spend the money of somebody you cannot be an activist at the aforementioned fourth dimension confronting this person. The office of the builder is to do something which attracts and seduces people to utilise the place every bit long as it is an art museum."

Ultimately, Herzog says, buildings are for the people who utilize them. "These institutions have to exist platforms for people to see and to go to. That I think is a very important statement," he says. "How to run information technology is something I cannot control."

That is the responsibility of Suhanya Raffel, the Australian fine art manager whose last major project, the Fine art Gallery of NSW's Sydney Modernistic was described by former prime number minister Paul Keating equally a "gigantic spoof" of "institutional conceit and cultural snobbery".

Raffel has never been shy of rattling the establishment.

When it opens on Friday works from the Chinese dissident artist best known for sticking his finger up at Beijing will be on display.

"Aye, we are exhibiting the work of Ai Weiwei," she says.

The backbone of the gallery is the private From Revolution to Globalisation collection of Uli Sigg, which spans modern Chinese art from the 1970s until 2012. Sigg's donation to the gallery includes 26 artworks past Ai Weiwei. Raffel did not elaborate on which works would be displayed.

'The Second Situation' by Geng Jianyi, 1987 displayed inside Grand+. Credit:

There are also pieces by Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik and Marcel Duchamp and the ballsy Asian Field by Antony Gormley, made upwardly of tens of thousands of clay figurines moulded in a hamlet in Guangzhou.

Raffel, who says the collection of visual culture volition rival that of the Centre Pompidou in Paris or the Museum of Mod Art in New York, is treading a much thinner line between expression and sedition in Hong Kong than in those other global cities.

In March Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam told art galleries to be on "full alert" confronting artworks that could endanger national security.

"We have to respect the freedom of artistic expression, only I'm certain staff [at cultural institutions] are able to tell whether pieces are meant to incite hatred or to destroy relations between two places and undermine national security," Lam said.

Raffel says M+ is like whatsoever institution in the globe, "we are non going to break the police force".

China imposed the national security laws in 2020 to put an cease to 18 months of anti-Beijing protests in the semi-autonomous region. More than than lxxx per cent of prosecutions under the laws so far have been for spoken communication-related crimes for statements such as "liberate Hong Kong".

M+ director Suhanya Raffel. Credit:Isaac Lawrence

The situation requires a closer level of negotiation with the government than many galleries outside China would be comfy with.

"Nosotros work very carefully with the regulatory authorities to ensure that we are compliant," she says.

"Hong Kong has been and is changing rapidly. And like in any major institution in a major city, we are likewise reflecting on what that means.

"That said, the curatorial integrity of what we had gear up out to practise is absolutely intact, nosotros are very proud of that. Information technology's a very important institution to bring to the world, I don't believe that nosotros volition see an establishment of this scale over again in our lifetimes."

Badiucao morphed the faces of Hong Kong'southward Chief Executive Carrie Lam with President Xi Jinping in 2018. Credit:Badiucao

Raffel will have to manage the expectations of an increasingly assertive Beijing, whose influence now reaches far wider than Hong Kong.

In October, the Chinese embassy in Rome demanded an exhibition by Chinese-Australian artist Badiucao in nearby Brescia be stopped. The Melbourne artist has previously lampooned Lam and Chinese President Xi Jinping by moulding them into i. The gallery declined to cancel the exhibition but Badiucao has been dismayed at what he says is a lack of support from Australian regime despite its recent strong condemnation of attempts at international censorship by Beijing.

In September, the OzAsia Festival in Adelaide said a local Hong Kong group would non be able to brandish yellow umbrellas every bit office of their functioning considering they were a symbol of the pro-democracy movement.

The politics in Hong Kong are much closer to home.

The gallery adjacent door to Grand+ is the Hong Kong Palace Museum. When it opens in 2022 information technology will display relics lent from Beijing's Forbidden City. The two institutions take been accused of existence too patriotic or not patriotic enough by Hongkongers on either side of politics.

"Politics are real here," Raffel's predecessor Lars Nittve, said in an interview in 2015. "It has real consequences, and you have to take it very seriously."

Herzog, who prefers the subtle verse of Baudelaire to the overtly political drama of Brecht, says there is e'er space for dash.

"I think that explicitly political statements in fine art are boring," he says. "And I think that the more poetic side has a much more seductive and besides a much more constructive, long-term effect."

Herzog has created a huge digital canvas in the middle of 1 of the most divided cities in the world to requite artists that opportunity.

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How free they are to express information technology will depend on how the M+ navigates the restrictions of new Hong Kong and Beijing's tolerance.

"This large slab, it really is a face that looks at the city of Hong Kong," he says. "It seems similar a commercial sign but in fact, information technology'southward the opposite. It's a platform for creative messages and we constitute that particularly interesting, also politically interesting, to offer such a tool to the institution and to the artists that show their work."

correction

A previous version of this article said Yard+ opened on Th. It opens on Friday.

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