A Galaxy Overhead: Hong Kong’s K11 MUSEA and the Mall Remade as Museum

On the waterfront at Tsim Sha Tsui in Hong Kong, at the heart of the Victoria Dockside redevelopment, stands K11 MUSEA. Step inside, look up at the ceiling of the central atrium, and for a moment you forget that you are in a shopping complex. This void, rising 35 metres, has been named the Opera Theatre, and its flowing curved surfaces are clad in some 1,100 square metres of hand-tamped aluminium. Set among the branches of that curve are around 1,800 programmable spotlights, flickering as they drift slowly across the ceiling. Speirs Major, who designed the lighting, called it a galaxy of pulsating stars. Directly above the floor where shoppers come and go, an artificial night sky stays permanently alight.

What this journal usually follows is the gap of a few minutes that opens in an advertising surface on the street, or the single image kindled on a facade — the tenkei that rises up in the landscape of a city from the outside. What K11 presents is the implementation on the opposite side. Art takes up residence not on the street but inside commercial space. It dissolves the very boundary between the sales floor and the exhibition room, kindling moments of art within the circuit of consumption. This method, which the founder Adrian Cheng (鄭志剛) calls "cultural commerce," is the most systematised operating example of "retail × contemporary art" in Asia.

A Museum Inside the Mall — Lineage

The quickest way into K11 is not through the history of retail floorspace but through the vision of a single collector. Adrian Cheng was born into the founding family of New World Development, one of Hong Kong's major property groups, and in 2008 launched K11 as a brand of his own. The following year, 2009, he opened the first K11 Art Mall at Tsim Sha Tsui in Hong Kong. Billed as the world's first "art mall," it was neither a museum nor a gallery but a complex that built permanent art spaces and an exhibition programme into the interior of a retail mall. In 2013 a K11 opened in Shanghai as well.

The decisive moment came in Shanghai in the spring of 2014. The chi K11 art museum inside the mall staged an Impressionist exhibition built around forty Monet works borrowed from the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris, joined by Berthe Morisot and Renoir (the run was 8 March to 15 June). The first full-scale Monet exhibition on the Chinese mainland was held not in a museum but in the basement of a retail complex, and it produced queues day after day. It made available to the urban public an experience that was not "going to a museum" but "going to the mall and finding art there" — and that single point became the proof of the cultural-commerce hypothesis.

Running alongside this commercial operation, Cheng established the K11 Art Foundation (KAF) in 2010. Declaring itself China's first non-profit, non-state art foundation, it set out to raise Chinese and Asian contemporary art onto the international stage. The foundation holds exhibition spaces in Hong Kong and Shanghai and a residency in Wuhan, and has programmed more than sixty exhibitions to date. What matters is the double structure: the foundation moves as a separate entity, cut off from the retail tenancy income, yet the place where its exhibitions are lined up is K11's retail floor. A for-profit vessel and a non-profit content cohabit the same building, each with its own division of labour.

One Hundred Creative Powers — Victoria Dockside and K11 MUSEA

Cultural commerce crystallised at its largest scale in the flagship K11 MUSEA, which opened in August 2019. The name is said to play on the Muses, the Greek goddesses of the arts, and on "A Muse by the Sea." It marks the ten-year culmination of New World Development's Victoria Dockside redevelopment, whose total cost is put at some 2.6 billion US dollars.

The design was carried not by a single architect but by a coalition of architects, designers and artists that Adrian Cheng calls the "100 Creative Powers." Overall direction went to Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF, with Forth Bagley as design lead), execution to Hong Kong's Ronald Lu & Partners, and the landscape — including the seventh-floor "Bohemian Garden" — to James Corner Field Operations. The aluminium curves of the Opera Theatre described at the outset are the work of local craftsmen in collaboration with LAAB Architects. The gross floor area reaches roughly 111,000 square metres, and the complex holds more than 50,000 square feet of living walls, indoors and out, together with one of Asia's largest MoMA Design Stores.

Read in terms of screens and light, two devices are embedded in this building. One is the array of some 1,800 spotlights in the Opera Theatre touched on at the outset — turning the ceiling itself into an enormous light installation that has no projection surface at all. The other is the Sunken Plaza below ground. Alongside conical glass panels, programmed water patterns and mist effects, a roughly 25-foot LED screen is set in place, and the plaza functions as a venue for film festivals and live events. Not an advertising surface but a screen for occasions. It is a case in which a retail complex's screen was built into the design as a "projection apparatus" from the very beginning.

Art Kindled in the Ma of Commerce

Let me reread K11's method in this journal's own vocabulary. Ma — the interval — names the work of opening up space or time. Where a street-based project such as CIRCA (/en/circa-global-midnight) opens a three-minute ma each night within the continuous sequence of advertising and kindles a monthly work there as a tenkei, what K11 opens is not an interval of time but an interval of space. Into the circuit of consumption — a floor plate that by rights ought to be filled with merchandise without a gap — it deliberately inserts blanks in the form of exhibition rooms, courtyards and atriums, and places art in them. Between one purchase and the next, a moment of art rises quietly into view.

This design carries, at one and the same time, a strength and a weakness that the street tenkei does not have. The strength is permanence. A street-based project that depends on the surrender of an advertising slot disappears the moment its agreement with the operator lapses. K11's art is built into the property itself, and so remains resident for as long as the building stands. Rather than depending on the economic power of commerce, it uses that power from the inside to let art run under its own steam — and it is because of this structure that KAF has been able, without relying on government subsidy, to turn over more than sixty exhibitions on the sustained resource of tenancy income.

The weakness is the reverse of the same coin: the risk that art ends up functioning as a device for adding value to real estate. "The mall remade as museum" is, seen from another angle, also "a museum absorbed into a mall." The starry sky of the Opera Theatre and the screen of the Sunken Plaza can, in the end, both be explained as devices for lifting dwell time and tenant sales. When the tenkei works not to kindle meaning in the landscape but to kindle land value, is that really art in permanent residence, or is it commerce dressed in art? The question sits at the core of the K11 case, and does not resolve easily. Cheng himself has consistently argued that the two are not opposed — that commerce is precisely the best route by which contemporary art reaches the everyday life of the public.

The Reach of a Muse by the Sea

Line up the partners the K11 Art Foundation has worked with and it becomes clear that this case does not stop at the story of one retail complex. The Palais de Tokyo and the Centre Pompidou in Paris; the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the New Museum in New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); the Serpentine Galleries and the Royal Academy in London — major Western institutions have partnered with a foundation born out of a mall as one of their points of access to Chinese and Asian contemporary art. That an organisation whose parent body is a retail complex connects head-on to the network of international art institutions is a fact that is itself rewriting the distribution map of art in twenty-first-century Asia.

Not to presuppose the active choice of "going to a museum." To place art, unavoidably, in the path of the person who came to shop, the person who came to meet someone, the person who came only to get out of the heat. What K11 is betting on is less the lowering of the threshold to viewing than the shifting of the very conditions under which the act of viewing occurs, over to the side of commercial space. As with the small figure or the boat in an ink-wash landscape, the tenkei is not the protagonist of the scene. But by its being placed there, the landscape acquires meaning and a bearing. What the muse by the sea asks is how the everyday life of a city changes once that tenkei is made permanently resident within the landscape of commerce — an experiment whose outcome is not yet in.

Sources

1. fig.001MUSE ROOMS: Explore Art & Design Dreamlands at K11 MUSEA — K11 MUSEA (YouTube)
2. fig.002K11 Konversations: WOAW Gallery — Breaking the Frontiers of Art — K11 MUSEA (YouTube)
3. fig.003Adrian Cheng & Carine Roitfeld on Craft and Couture at K11 MUSEA — K11 MUSEA (YouTube)(2021-10)
4. fig.004RCA Vice-Chancellor’s Talks: Adrian Cheng — Royal College of Art (YouTube)(2021-07)
5. [5]New Flagship Museum-Retail Complex “K11 MUSEA” Announced; Opens in Q3 2019 — K11 (Press Release)(2019)
6. [6]K11 MUSEA / KPF + RLP — ArchDaily(2019)
7. [7]Victoria Dockside — Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF)
8. [8]Living wall cascades down K11 Musea shopping centre in Hong Kong — Dezeen(2019-10)
9. [9]Monet Masterpieces to be Exhibited in China — K11(2014)
10. [10]K11 Art Foundation — Wikipedia
11. [11]Adrian Cheng — Wikipedia
12. [12]Victoria Dockside — Wikipedia

Operations Record

OPERATOR

K11 Group / New World Development (Hong Kong; founded by Adrian Cheng)

LOCATION

Hong Kong, Shanghai

MODEL

Corporate programme — A “cultural commerce” model embedding programming curated by the non-profit K11 Art Foundation (est. 2010) into retail complexes (K11 Art Mall / K11 MUSEA)

ARTIST PAY

Foundation commissions, co-productions with international institutions, and a residency (Wuhan); the retail tenancy underwrites the venue

CADENCE

Permanent, year-round; rotating exhibitions cycle through in-house galleries, the atrium, and the sunken plaza

SPEC

c. 111,483 m² GFA; the 35 m Opera Theatre atrium (c. 1,115 m² of hand-tamped aluminium and c. 1,800 programmable spotlights by Speirs Major), a c. 25-ft LED in the Sunken Plaza, and 50,000+ sq ft of living walls

SINCE

2009

STATUS

Active

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