Hong Kong Palace Museum ends free tickets offer

Hong Kong Palace Museum will stop offering free tickets every Wednesday in July as the turnout rate fell by a half to 35 percent in the past six months, says museum director Louis Ng Chi-wa. 

As such, Ng said Wednesday is the quietest day. In order not to waste the tickets, he said more than 120,000 tickets will be offered to the underprivileged every year in the future.

An exhibition with 52 masterpieces borrowed from the British National Gallery will be staged for four months from November. Masterpieces by Raphael, Rembrandt, Turner, Monet, Van Gogh will be exhibited. This is in addition to a portrait painting exhibition with works borrowed from The Palace Museum in December and an archaeological exhibition of Sanxingdui in September.

West Kowloon Cultural District chief executive Betty Fung Ching Suk-yee said the operating deficit has been slashed by a third in the past fiscal year, thanks to better cost control, improved leasing income, and more commercial sponsorships. Therefore, the HK$21.6 billion budget offered by the government, which was planned to be used by the end of this year, would be sufficient till 2025.

She hopes to look for more sponsors for various exhibitions, stressing that the cost recovery ratio of M+ and HKPM is 45 percent, which is better than many museums worldwide. Ticket sales on average can only cover half of the total costs of about HK$200 million for staging an exhibition, explained Fung. 

Wendy Gan Kim-see, deputy chief executive (district development), said the construction of a music center would be the most costly one among buildings in the pipeline due to the acoustic requirements. She does not rule out offering naming rights to fund its construction.