Museums have always existed to teach us what’s of significance to a given society and, by omission, what’s not. But today the role of the museum as a centre of learning has become more complex as its authority is increasingly perceived to be contingent rather than necessary. Here, Doryun Chong, chief curator at M+, Hong Kong’s recently opened global museum of visual culture, speaks of how expectations of what museums are supposed to do are increasingly sliding into aspects of social care and responsibility
Mark Rappolt: What role does education play at an institution such as M+?
Doryun Chong: It was decided from very early on in the process of setting up the institution that anybody who is creating public-facing content should be part of the curatorial department. We started from a very flat structure. Education or pedagogy isn’t just the domain of education curators or learning curators at M+. And we believe that learning is a lifelong activity. It does not take place only during the formal years of schoolgoing.
As a brand new institution, we were trying to think about the journey of learning from infancy to adolescence to adulthood and beyond, to provide entry points for people in different stages of life, and to stay with them as they age and as they also grow older with us. We opened in the middle of the pandemic, and during our first year there was such a need for an alternative to school learning, especially because kids weren’t able to go to school, so we have developed quite robust children and family programmes. During the pandemic everyone in our field had to go through a process of thinking about how museums can provide spaces of healing and connecting. Maybe what was a little bit different for us at M+ is that we were doing this in parallel with opening the new museum at the same time.
MR: Sometimes you can have a show that doesn’t have a message, or an exhibition that resists any definitive explanation. Do all the shows have to have a kind of outreach and education programme built into them? Or can something be just what it is?
DC: I don’t believe so, philosophically speaking. But as a very new institution, we’re not quite there in confronting that kind of question just yet. We opened over a year ago with a suite of exhibitions drawn from different parts of the permanent collection we had built over about a decade, establishing the baseline narrative of what we mean by being a visual culture museum based in Hong Kong with global perspectives. We’re a museum that shows the gigantic neon signs that we have salvaged from the streets of Hong Kong and are going to be keeping and preserving in perpetuity. We are a museum that has also preserved Shiro Kuramata’s Kiyotomo sushi bar (1988) and installed it semipermanently in our gallery. We are also a museum that has a LED media facade of 66 meters high and 110 across. (Whether you like it or not, you’ll be looking at our artist commissions from across the harbour.) I think that all of these create a new definition of art, as well as what the boundaries of visual culture can be and act differently than established ways of doing things.
We have a very broad platform at M+, showing a wide range of artworks and objects: some are easier and others are very, very challenging. We do a lot of work, especially with our interpretation, on what level to pitch our language and our voice, making sure that our labels and interpretative panels are written in ways that are succinct and accessible, friendly but informed.
MR: In a way, whether you like it or not, the role of the institution is partly to argue why art is an essential part of civic culture. Is that something you feel you need to do too?
DC: Yes, definitely. During our first year of the museum’s operation, when Hong Kong was practically closed to the rest of the world, most of our visitors were from Hong Kong. That was a blessing in disguise because we were given ample time for our most proximal public to discover us, embrace us and adopt us, as a local institution that is part of their everyday life. The exhibition dedicated to Hong Kong visual culture has been by far the most favoured. But then, a large enough portion of the visitors began to get the picture of how the different parts – Hong Kong visual culture, contemporary Chinese art, and then international art, and design and architecture – may fit together into a whole.
MR: When it comes to things like captions, labels, catalogues and everything else, how do you get the balance right, to leave that indeterminacy that maybe isn’t always valued but, in some ways, is also what makes what you show art?
DC: It’s a controversial subject among us. Roughly 20 to 30 percent of the works and objects exhibited in our galleries have an extended label. They’re very succinct, no more than 100 words each. Our introductory and didactic panels are never longer than 150 words each. At the entrance of each exhibition, we have just one sentence or one phrase that describes the exhibition. For Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now, the entrance graphic says, ‘Discover this visionary artist’s groundbreaking career and witness the power of art to connect and heal’. That’s not just a marketing exercise. We wanted to make sure that the message gets to the public as quickly as possible in the most accessible way.
MR: Meanings of works, and their interpretations, can change radically over time. Once you’ve written the object description and interpretation, you’re going to have to update constantly, indefinitely. In a way, this reflects the social context within which the museum exists. How much of that is driven by what’s outside the museum, and the moral and ethical values of the society it’s meant to represent?
DC: Do we always move with the wind? I do think that you must do some of that. How do you talk, for example, about the fact that we celebrate and canonise certain artists? But by doing so, we may not be sufficiently gender-conscious? These kinds of things come up as issues as societies evolve, and museums have to adapt to the changing morals and expectations of the audiences. You have to hold onto certain things, however, and you don’t always just move immediately with the changing winds. We have to have agility as well as sensitivity.
MR: How much freedom within that do individual curators have to push their own interpretations?
DC: At M+ our learning curators drive the processes related to all the public-facing interpretations. The curators who are experts in their subjects of course have a say in the interpretations, but for us, our learning curators are the experts in our voice, and they are the ones who represent how we should look from the public side. I think that ping-pong back and forth between our exhibition curators and our learning curators is necessarily what produces the right tone and the right amount of information for us.
MR: Does that get more complicated when, in the case of Kusama, you’ve got a living artist who has their own ideas about what their work means?
DC: Making the Kusama exhibition involved a very close collaborative working relationship with the artist’s studio. I think of the staff of her studio as the artist’s eyes and ears, but also sometimes her brain as well. I have to really give it to the people in Kusama’s studio. When it came to interpretation, whether it’s labels and didactics in the exhibition or the curators’ essays in the catalogue, the studio staff always maintained a very respectful distance. They seemed to know that the biggest part of their job is to represent the artist’s intentions and wishes and protect her legacy, but you don’t do that by micromanaging and overcontrolling how interpretation happens.
MR: With people gravitating more and more towards digital platforms, whether before, after or even instead of the physical exhibition, how do you factor that in when you’re thinking about programming shows, and their outreach and interpretation? In previous eras, most experience of exhibitions in other countries was entirely through catalogues. I’m wondering if today we’re more conscious of that audience because the digital has a different immediacy?
DC: From the outset of M+, it was envisioned that M+ will not just be about the exhibitions in its physical building, but also what happens in our online spaces. Here, we host M+ Magazine and our other digitally-born content, such as our interactive sites and digital commissions. As a twenty-first-century museum, I don’t think that you can think of digital as only a supportive function anymore. There has to be a much more porous relationship between what takes place in the museum’s physical spaces and its digital spaces.
For instance, with Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now we created an online swipe show that our digital team has created of her chronology, based on a very extensive visual chronology that we made for the print book and then adapted in digital format. I think it is a useful tool, which we should be immediately archiving as soon as the exhibition is done. There’s a whole infrastructural challenge that we experience, because of the ever-increasing obsolescence of softwares and hardwares. This is really the big challenge that all institutions are facing in terms of resources. As hardware and software go extinct faster and faster, how do you continue to migrate? How do you keep them alive? Again, as a new institution born in the twenty-first century, this is something we think about on different levels.
MR: Does the digital shift the idea of storage, where works in storage can somehow be present?
DC: Absolutely. The M+ Collection Archive has now more than 50,000 items in it. But there is a backlog of work to digitise. We’ve done already quite a bit of it, and this is necessary work to create a continuum between the physical and the virtual. My mantra in establishing this new museum has been that we cannot build a twenty-first-century museum without having built a twentieth-century museum, which we haven’t done yet here in Hong Kong.
When the M+ building opened in 2021, we had in our opening displays the latest TV sculpture by Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries in one gallery, and just next door we had the complete archive of the RMB City (2007–11) by Cao Fei. Just two galleries over was Ian Cheng’s BOB (Bag of Beliefs) (2018–19) generating and regenerating itself. At the point when the museum opened it felt as if the whole building itself was a media space. It felt as if the whole museum was actually embodying, inside and outside, what the twenty-first-century landscape of digitally generated art and moving image looks like. We can really start to create a genealogy.
MR: What do you make of the common view of the museum as a sort of pickling jar, there simply to preserve artworks?
DC: In one of our inaugural exhibitions, The Dream of the Museum, we exhibited Marcel Duchamp’s From or by Marcel Duchamp or Rrose Sélavy (Box in a Valise) (1935–41/63–66), which is a case containing 80 miniature reproductions of Duchamp’s works. While this editioned piece has been shown in established museums in major cities, most pieces are laid flat, making most of the works invisible. So we devised a way of installing the work as if it was frozen in motion, like The Matrix, with every single part of the box visible. For our audience, it was important to give a higher level of transparency and visibility than ever before to a work that is canonical in the history of modern art, through an innovative exhibition design. This exhibition design then became the basis for an interactive 3D digital model, which we launched as a simple online game to be played. We have to pickle certain things for preservation, but at the same time, I think that we’re also trying to push the envelope in new methodologies, new interpretation and new ways that the public can access these often very esoteric things.
MR: Is there a mathematics to the pickling? In that, if you carry on preserving an increasing number of objects then how does that affect resources, environmentally or even simply space-wise?
DC: I think our neon signs are a good example. We have a Conservation and Storage Facility, which has a ground-floor gallery that audiences can’t enter, but you can look in and it shows two gigantic neon signs in our collection. We need to show them, as for a vast majority of Hong Kong people, if they knew anything about the museum, it is the neon signs we have in our collection. The signs are big, and structurally damaged; it’s going to take years of conservation for us to be even able to show them. But it was important putting some of them in our visible storage, so that our audiences can already examine what they look like.
That, for me, is a perfect example of a disappearing visual culture in Hong Kong, where questions of resources and sustainability are immediately raised. For a museum, what does a balance between preservation and sustainability mean? After having acquired about half a dozen representative examples of neon signs, this would be what we can commit to preserving in perpetuity; but that’s not what people necessarily think that we should be holding. There are those who think we should have more examples. Those equations of what we can do, and what we should do, are being raised in all areas of the collection.
MR: Another aspect of pickling might also be the way the value of objects, say a rice cooker, changes over time.
DC: The rice cookers in our collection are now out of production. Old CD covers are a big area for our collection as well. We decided very early on that we were going to bring those objects into the collection. It’s a totally different kind of conversation then about which ones we should get. Should they be the first printing? Do you source them from eBay or old, respected antique CD shops? There was a lot of discussion around that, but ultimately it was not about financial values at all, but rather about their historic values. Even if each CD costs very little, there’s a value in the fact that our audiences recognise them, because they may even have them still in their own collection. As well as the placement of these objects, putting these CD covers in the same space as other rarefied objects, it gives a different sense of value that audiences might have never thought about before.
Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now is on show at M+, Hong Kong, through 14 May
This interview is part of a wider partnership With M+ exploring the museum’s collections and programmes
