A day in West Kowloon is one of the most rewarding cultural days you can spend in Hong Kong. On a stretch of reclaimed waterfront facing Hong Kong Island, two very different museums stand a short stroll apart: the Hong Kong Palace Museum, with its treasures of Chinese art and craft, and M+, a museum of visual culture devoted to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Between them run lawns and promenades that turn gold in the late afternoon.
Here is how to pace it, with opening details accurate as of this writing.
Morning: the Hong Kong Palace Museum
Start with the older art while your attention is fresh. The Hong Kong Palace Museum opened to the public on July 2, 2022, in a building by Rocco Design Architects Associates that draws on the fine details, simple contours and elegant forms of traditional Chinese art. Stacked atriums pull daylight deep into the interior, and the effect is calm and luminous.
Nine galleries spread across roughly 30,000 square meters, filled mainly with works on loan from The Palace Museum in Beijing alongside pieces from institutions around the world. Give yourself time with the ceramics, where glazes shift from celadon to imperial yellow, and with the jade carvings and goldwork, which reward a slow, close look. Multimedia displays add context without crowding the objects.
Booking tickets online ahead of time is the smoothest approach, and the museum’s website lists the day’s hours and any special exhibitions.
Lunch on the waterfront
Stroll along Museum Drive to M+, which has its own dining. AGATE serves throughout the day, and Mosu Hong Kong, the Hong Kong outpost of chef Sung Anh’s celebrated Seoul restaurant, opens for lunch from Tuesday to Saturday. A long, quiet lunch here sets up the afternoon nicely.
Afternoon: M+ in West Kowloon
M+ opened in November 2021 in a building by Herzog & de Meuron with Farrells. Its shape is an upside-down T: a broad exhibition platform lifted above the ground, with a slender tower rising from it. That tower’s facade carries a vast LED screen that shows artworks to the whole harbor after dark.
Inside, the collection moves across art, design and architecture. Its founding gift came from the Swiss collector Uli Sigg, who donated more than 1,400 works of Chinese contemporary art. Design lovers will want to find the complete sushi bar designed by Shiro Kuramata, reassembled within the collection, and architecture enthusiasts can look for material from the Archigram archive, which the museum acquired in 2019. Downstairs, Found Space is a dramatic, industrial-scale gallery shaped around the Airport Express tunnels below.
Several spaces are free, including the Mediatheque, where you can browse films and video art, and the Roof Garden on the third floor, which has one of the most beautiful views of Hong Kong Island’s skyline.
Evening: harbor light
As the afternoon softens, head out to the waterfront lawns. The view takes in the full sweep of the island, and if you time it for sunset you will watch the towers flicker on one by one while the M+ facade begins to glow behind you. On Fridays, M+ stays open until 10 p.m., so you can slip back in for a final gallery after dark.
To cross back to Hong Kong Island, the WestK Ferry runs between WestK Quay and Central Pier No. 9 in about eight minutes, a lovely way to end the day on the water.
Practical notes
- As of this writing, M+ opens Tuesday to Sunday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., with late hours on Friday, and is closed on Mondays except some public holidays.
- Kowloon and Austin MTR stations are each around a 10 to 15 minute walk from M+.
- Book Hong Kong Palace Museum tickets ahead, and allow two to three hours for each museum.
- Comfortable shoes matter; the district is made for walking.
