Five years after opening on the West Kowloon waterfront, M+ is marking the milestone by turning the museum itself into part of the celebration.
From November 1 to 8, the museum will stage a week of screenings, performances, workshops and gallery encounters, culminating in free admission to designated exhibitions on November 8. The anniversary arrives after M+ welcomed more than 12.5 million visitors in its first five years.
Rather than centering the occasion on a single exhibition, the program moves between Hong Kong cinema, live music, sustainability and hands-on activities — reflecting the museum’s broader remit across art, design, architecture and moving image.
The celebrations begin on November 1 with the inaugural M+ Restored Festival, bringing together all nine restored Hong Kong New Wave films from the museum’s three-year M+ Restored initiative for their first collective presentation.
Running on selected weekends through December 27, the festival pairs 4K restorations with talks, post-screening conversations and workshops involving filmmakers and restoration specialists, revisiting a defining chapter of Hong Kong cinema while looking at how its legacy continues across generations.
The anniversary also looks forward. On November 6, M+ will host the first Asian edition of the Culture for the Planet Summit, bringing cultural leaders, sustainability practitioners and researchers together to examine how arts organizations can translate environmental commitments into practice.
Later that evening, the museum shifts into a livelier register with M+ at Night: Five With Us. Cantopop band RubberBand headlines the sold-out event alongside indie band Goodnight Lillie and Paraguay’s Recycled Orchestra of Cateura, with dance performances and DJ sets continuing until midnight.
The Recycled Orchestra of Cateura is one of the more unusual guests of the anniversary weekend.
Made up of children and young people from communities near the Cateura landfill in Asunción, the ensemble performs with instruments handmade by local artisans from discarded materials. Some examples of these instruments are already part of the M+ Collection and feature in the museum’s Making It Matters exhibition.
The group will perform at the Grand Stair on November 7 and 8, before staging a casual sunset pop-up at Artist Square on Sunday evening. Visitors can also see Landfill Harmonic, a documentary following the orchestra’s rise from a community music school to an internationally touring ensemble.
For those who would rather make something themselves, a recycled-instrument workshop will turn plastic bottles, tin cans and cardboard boxes into playable objects, with orchestra members demonstrating how to use them before participants come together for a group performance.
Elsewhere, M+ Educators will lead a Pinhole Cinema workshop in which participants build their own viewing boxes to experiment with light and perspective, while the family-friendly Pixel Monster activity brings a more playful note to the weekend.
November 8 will be the most accessible part of the anniversary celebrations, with free admission to designated exhibitions from 10am to 8pm.
The offer does not cover the special exhibitions Design Ah! Experience the Wonder of Everyday Design and Myths and Monsters: The Art of Fantasy in Asia, but visitors can otherwise explore participating galleries without advance registration and join free screenings at the Mediatheque and Grand Stair.
Across November 7 and 8, more than 20 in-gallery encounters will also invite visitors to rediscover the museum through tours, pop-up conversations and less obvious corners selected by the M+ team, educators, guides and community collaborators.
The museum is also asking visitors to contribute their own memories. Through M+ Moments, the public can submit favorite photographs taken at the museum, with 20 selected images to appear on digital screens later in November.
The fifth birthday also comes with its own collectible objects.
M+ has created exclusive Godzilla designs that play with the museum’s architecture and Hong Kong visual references. The collaboration even extends to a Godzilla-themed pickleball paddle — perhaps one of the more unexpected pieces of museum merchandise to emerge from West Kowloon.
Other pieces include a special-edition TWEMCO clock and an M+-exclusive silver-gray ECHO chair by ZHA and Nagami, limited globally to 55 pieces.
There are also miniature versions of the M+ building and a special-edition mahjong set that gives traditional auspicious motifs a contemporary design treatment.
Visitors with November birthdays can redeem a complimentary “Very Hong Kong” plush keychain blind box with a same-day paid admission ticket, while those purchasing or renewing an M+ membership during the promotional period can receive an extra month of membership and redeem a limited-edition building miniature, subject to availability.
Beyond the birthday programming, the anniversary offers a snapshot of how M+ has grown since 2021.
Its collection now exceeds 9,000 works. Around half of visitors come from Hong Kong, with the remainder from mainland China and elsewhere, while the museum says it has reached 70 percent of Hong Kong schools and established long-term partnerships with more than 770 primary and secondary schools.
Its exhibitions have also traveled beyond the city. Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now drew more than 1.65 million visitors across Hong Kong, Bilbao and Porto, while I. M. Pei: Life Is Architecture attracted nearly 400,000 across Hong Kong, Shanghai and Doha. M+ Restored films have meanwhile screened at festivals including Cannes, Venice and New York.
The museum has signed 15 collaborative agreements with institutions including Centre Pompidou, MoMA, the Getty Conservation Institute, Powerhouse and Tate. Its next chapter will also include the launch of M+ Academy in November, aimed at supporting current and emerging cultural leaders.
“Five years ago, M+ opened with an ambitious vision: to create a museum rooted in Hong Kong and engaged with the world,” M+ Board chairman Paulo Pong Kin-yee said. “More than 12.5 million visits later, we can see how strongly that vision has resonated.”
Museum director Suhanya Raffel said the next chapter would focus on creating more opportunities for audiences to encounter new ideas and perspectives.
For its fifth birthday, though, M+ is keeping the invitation simple: come back, look again and, for one weekend at least, experience the museum a little differently.
marco.lam@singtaonewscorp.com
