M+ shortlist

On the same day that it announced the designers of the new Xiqu Centre, the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority (WKCDA) has revealed the shortlist of six design teams — Herzog & de Meuron + TFP Farrells, Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa/SANAA, Renzo Piano Building Workshop, Shigeru Ban Architects + Thomas Chow Architects, Snøhetta, and Toyo Ito & Associates + Benoy Limited — invited to submit proposals for the architectural design of M+, Hong Kong's future museum for 20th and 21st century visual culture within the District, scheduled for completion in 2017.

At 62,000 square metres, the M+ is an ambitious museum project, on par with The Museum of Modern Art in New York. Situated on the waterfront of the Victoria Harbour at the edge of a 14-hectare park, the architecture brief will be shaped around the museum's core values. It will provide vital space for artists to meet, exhibit and experiment and will house a world-class permanent collection of Hong Kong, Chinese, and Asian visual culture: art, design, architecture and the moving image.

Until the opening of the first buildings in the West Kowloon Cultural District, WKCDA will provide a platform for arts communities to interact, engage, learn and develop and will stage an events program in the new year.

Mobile M+, a series of pop-up "nomadic" exhibitions curated by M+ scheduled to occur leading up to the opening of the M+ museum in 2017 was launched in May with Mobile M+: Yau Ma Tei, an exhibition of interventions by Hong Kong artists within the museum's future neighbourhood. The next exhibition, Inflation! will open in March and run through to May to coincide with the first edition of Art Basel in Hong Kong. Next January, M+ will collaborate with the Asia Art Archive to present new work by Song Dong for an exhibition at Artistree.