Hong Kong Art, Architecture & Culture: the back story

About Hong Kong Art, Architecture & Culture: the back story

By the ULTIMATE Hong Kong Editorial Team

Editor-in-Chief: Jai Michael

In little more than a decade Hong Kong has given itself a new cultural skyline: a museum of visual culture with one of the world’s largest LED façades, a Palace Museum with treasures on loan from Beijing, and a Victorian police compound reborn as a centre for heritage and the arts. Here is the story behind them, and how to see them well.

West Kowloon on the water

The most dramatic change to Hong Kong’s cultural life has happened on reclaimed land at the western tip of the Kowloon peninsula. The West Kowloon Cultural District now holds M+, the Hong Kong Palace Museum and the Xiqu Centre, joined by a park that runs along the harbour, and on a clear evening the view back across the water to the towers of Central is one of the finest in the city.

M+ opened to the public on 12 November 2021 as a museum of contemporary visual culture: art, design, architecture and the moving image, gathered from Hong Kong, Asia and beyond. Herzog & de Meuron, chosen through an international competition, designed it with TFP Farrells and Arup as an upside-down “T”: a broad podium and a slender tower. The podium holds some 17,000 square metres of exhibition space across 33 galleries, with cinemas, a Learning Hub and a Roof Garden facing Victoria Harbour. The tower is clad in terracotta, and its façade is one of the largest LED screens in the world, showing commissioned artworks on the skyline every evening.

Hong Kong’s art scene lives in unlikely places: a prison yard, a police dormitory, a factory floor, and a waterfront built on reclaimed land.

The building is shaped by what lies beneath it. The Airport Express railway tunnel runs under the site, and rather than hide it the architects dug around it to create the Found Space, a raw, cavernous gallery where you can sense the trains below. This season’s exhibitions include “Myths and Monsters: The Art of Fantasy”, from 17 October 2026 to 4 April 2027.

A short walk east, the Hong Kong Palace Museum opened on 2 July 2022. Rocco Design Architects Associates, led by Rocco Yim, designed a seven-storey building whose exterior draws on the essence of Chinese art objects; inside, three atriums stacked on a vertical axis echo the central axis of the Forbidden City. Nine galleries cover about 7,800 square metres: seven show treasures from the Palace Museum in Beijing, and two are devoted to Hong Kong, including a gallery on the history of Chinese art collecting in the city. The opening exhibitions brought 914 objects from Beijing, which the Palace Museum described as among the largest loans it had ever made outside the Mainland.

Complete the district at the Xiqu Centre, the home of Chinese opera. Beyond its 1,000-seat Grand Theatre, the Tea House Theatre lets you watch the resident Tea House Rising Stars Troupe over dim sum and tea: the most relaxed introduction to Cantonese opera you will find.

Old Town Central

On the Island side, the story is one of reuse. Tai Kwun, on Hollywood Road, was the Central Police Station, the Central Magistracy and Victoria Prison: three Declared Monuments on one hillside compound. It reopened in May 2018 as a centre for heritage and the arts, the result of a partnership between the Hong Kong Jockey Club and the Hong Kong SAR Government, run on a not-for-profit model. Sixteen historic buildings were conserved around their yards, and Herzog & de Meuron added two new ones: JC Contemporary, a gallery for contemporary art, and JC Cube, an auditorium for performance and film, both wrapped in cast-aluminium bricks that recall the old prison walls. In 2019 the project received the Award of Excellence in the UNESCO Asia-Pacific Awards for Cultural Heritage Conservation.

Climb Aberdeen Street to PMQ, the former police married quarters, where design studios and pop-up shops for Hong Kong designers fill the old flats around an open courtyard. Then walk west along Hollywood Road, past its antique shops and galleries, to Man Mo Temple and its coils of incense.

Down the hill on Queen’s Road Central, H Queen’s shows how seriously the city takes the art market: a tower of 24 floors built to house leading galleries and auction rooms. Its architect, William Lim of CL3 Architects, gave the gallery floors an external gondola and an opening curtain-wall façade, so that large works can be lifted straight in from the street.

Wong Chuk Hang

For the gallery scene beyond Central, take the MTR to Wong Chuk Hang. Here galleries and studios have moved into converted warehouses and factory buildings: Blindspot Gallery, for photography, in the Po Chai Industrial Building; de Sarthe in Vita Tower; Rossi & Rossi in M Place. Since 2017 the HKWalls festival has painted murals across the district’s façades. The scene is spread out, so check each gallery’s opening times before you go, and look at the South Island Cultural District’s website for current events.

The harbourfront stages

Hong Kong’s classic venues still line the harbour. On Salisbury Road in Tsim Sha Tsui, the Hong Kong Cultural Centre is home to the Hong Kong Philharmonic; its oval Concert Hall has one of the largest mechanical pipe organs in the region, and its Grand Theatre stages ballet, opera and musicals. Next door, the Hong Kong Museum of Art looks out over the water. Across the harbour, Hong Kong City Hall, opened in 1962 as the city’s first multi-purpose cultural complex, has a Concert Hall prized for its acoustics, while the Fringe Club, in the Grade I-listed Old Dairy Farm Depot, has championed contemporary arts since 1983.

The cultural calendar

Late winter and spring are Hong Kong’s great arts season. The 55th Hong Kong Arts Festival runs in February and March 2027, opening on 18 February and closing on 19 March, with about 45 programmes of theatre, music, dance and opera; the full line-up and booking are on the festival’s own site.

Then comes Art Month. Art Basel Hong Kong returns from 25 to 27 March 2027, and Art Central, staged in a purpose-built pavilion on the Central Harbourfront, runs from 24 to 28 March 2027, with a preview on 23 March. Book hotels early: this is one of the busiest weeks of the year.

What’s new

WestK Performing Arts Centre (checked October 2026): the district’s third performing arts venue, focused on dance, is under construction, and the West Kowloon Cultural District lists its opening as 2027. It was planned with a lyric theatre of 1,450 seats, a media theatre and a studio theatre.

M+ (checked October 2026): M+ introduced single-price admission on 15 July 2025; see its website for current tickets.

Our advice

Give West Kowloon a full day: M+ in the morning, lunch on the waterfront, the Palace Museum in the afternoon, and stay for the LED façade after dark. Book Palace Museum tickets ahead, remember it closes on Tuesdays, and save Tai Kwun and PMQ for an evening in Central, when the courtyards fill with diners.

Opening hours, prices and seasonal openings change, so please check with Hong Kong Art, Architecture & Culture: the back story before you go.