As it prepares to open later this year in the city’s West Kowloon Cultural District, Hong Kong’s new M+ museum has received a major donation from the local collector Hallam Chow featuring 17 works by 13 artists and collectives. The pieces date from the 1990s to the 2010s, and will help shape the institution’s collection of contemporary Asian art.
Among the works in the donation are works by seven Japanese artists and collectives, including Aida Makoto, Chim↑Pom, Konoike Tomoko, Odani Motohiko, and Shioyasu Tomoko. Other artists represented in the group of gifted works are Montien Boonma, Lee Bul, Liang Yuanwei, Liu Wei, and Adrian Wong.
Doryun Chong, deputy director of M+’s curatorial department and chief curator at the museum, said in a statement that the gift “greatly enhances the museum’s ability to create even more inventive and thought-provoking narratives about how contemporary art has made critical contributions to visual culture in Asia, which now has global resonances.”
Chow, who is a grandson of the antiques collector Edward T. Chow, has been a supporter of the M+ museum for several years, having donated 25 pieces to the institution since 2016. He serves as chairman of the M+ International Council for Visual Art, and he said in a release, “It has been my goal to support and encourage the important contribution of Asian artists to the overall development of contemporary art globally.”
Chow’s donation is not the only significant gift that the M+ Museum has received in recent months. In December, the institution announced that it had been given key artworks from Hong Kong–based collectors William and Lavina Lim.
