Cover From left: Laurent Le Bon, the president of Centre Pompidou, and Suhanya Raffel, the museum director of M+, signing the partnership between the two institutions in May 2026 (Photo: courtesy of Winnie Yeung of Visual Voices and M+)
From left: Laurent Le Bon, the president of Centre Pompidou, and Suhanya Raffel, the museum director of M+, signing the partnership between the two institutions in May 2026 (Photo: courtesy of Winnie Yeung of Visual Voices and M+)
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M+ has signed a partnership with Paris’s prestigious Centre Pompidou this month, which features collaborative research and exhibition projects slated for 2027
Hong Kong’s visual culture museum M+ signed a multi-year strategic partnership with Paris’s Centre Pompidou this month. The alliance focuses on four key areas: joint curatorial research; exhibition development and sharing; co-commissions and artwork displays; and collection exchange.
Stretching across a four-year timeline, the programme will kick off in 2027, first at the M+ Focus Gallery, which is dedicated to exhibitions with a concentrated and singular focus. This will be followed by a large-scale exhibition from Centre Pompidou, co-organised with M+, as well as a research-based exhibition at the Cissy Pui-Lai Pao and Shinichiro Watari Galleries at M+ in 2028.
One can also look forward to a major exhibition jointly organised by, presented at and featuring works from both institutions. It will be inaugurated at Centre Pompidou after its reopening, with an M+ presentation to follow.
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Above From left: Christile Drulhe, Consul General of France in Hong Kong and Macau; Laurent Le Bon; Paulo Pong, the chairman of M+ Board; and Suhanya Raffel (Photo: courtesy of Winnie Yeung of Visual Voices and M+)
From left: Christile Drulhe, Consul General of France in Hong Kong and Macau; Laurent Le Bon; Paulo Pong, the chairman of M+ Board; and Suhanya Raffel (Photo: courtesy of Winnie Yeung of Visual Voices and M+)
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“This is about doing something that we couldn’t [otherwise have done] without each other, and to build something that shows what we have done in Hong Kong in an international context in Paris, and vice versa,” says M+’s museum director Suhanya Raffel.
She says that the exhibitions will span topics such as the Asian diaspora from France, NFTs, AI, and architecture. “Both Pompidou and M+ share a very strong interest in design and architecture, and so we want to build on that as well,” says Raffel. As an example, she mentioned how when Laurent Le Bon, the president of Centre Pompidou, visited M+ last year, he took a particular interest in the Nakagin capsule. “He thought it was a very important piece of architecture that needs to be seen in Paris as well,” she says.
Built in 1972, the Nakagin Capsule Tower was made up of 140 customisable living units bolted onto two concrete towers for suburban dwellers who needed short-term stays in Tokyo. These units were used and replaced over time to extend the lifespan of the overall building, and were part of the 1960s Japanese architectural movement known as Metabolism. The building was disassembled in 2022; only 23 capsules were rescued and conserved by four museums in the world—M+ collected Unit A806.
Above M+ (Photo: courtesy of Kevin Mak and Herzog & de Meuron)
M+ (Photo: courtesy of Kevin Mak and Herzog & de Meuron)
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Furthermore, the collaboration will extend to the M+ Façade and the rooftop Belvedere of Centre Pompidou Francilien in Massy, France—a new Pompidou venue that will open next year. Starting from March 2027, the public will witness digital and moving-image artwork displays co-commissioned by M+ and Centre Pompidou. This project is both a celebration of Centre Pompidou Paris’s 50th anniversary and a nod to its design history. Le Bon explains that in 1971, when Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, the architects who designed Centre Pompidou, submitted their first sketches of the venue, they envisioned the façade like a screen. “Fifty years later, there is one building that succeeds in this: M+, which, of course, is known all around the world for its fantastic screen façade,” he says.
The conversations about the partnership started a few years ago, when Raffel felt it was time for M+ to expand its impact. “This is Asia’s global museum of contemporary visual culture, so it is also our job to make connections [with global institutions with similar visions],” she says. Both museums share a dedication to representing the 20th and 21st centuries through an expansive, interdisciplinary lens that encompasses visual art, design, architecture, and the moving image.
Above Laurent Le Bon, the president of Centre Pompidou, who signed a partnership with M+ this month (Photo: courtesy of Winnie Yeung of Visual Voices and M+)
Laurent Le Bon, the president of Centre Pompidou, who signed a partnership with M+ this month (Photo: courtesy of Winnie Yeung of Visual Voices and M+)
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“Also, resources shrink,” she adds. “We can’t keep acquiring. We need to start sharing what we acquire in the most intelligent and creative ways. So this is also [how] a multi-year strategic partnership like this [achieves] that with very particular outcomes.”
When looking across the global landscape of contemporary art museums, Centre Pompidou stood out as a touchstone for M+. Since emerging in the mid-20th century, the Paris institution has fundamentally redefined what a modern, multi-disciplinary cultural hub can look like. For the young M+ team, Centre Pompidou acted as an essential museum mentor during its initial blueprinting phase, helping to guide the core principles of building Asia’s global museum of visual culture.
“What I like in M+ is that it reinvents the multidisciplinary concept of the museum,” says Le Bon. “I don’t see so many institutions in Asia and even in the world which are at this scale with this array of activities, of this large panorama.”
Above Suhanya Raffel, the museum director of M+ (Photo: courtesy of Winnie Yeung of Visual Voices and M+)
Suhanya Raffel, the museum director of M+ (Photo: courtesy of Winnie Yeung of Visual Voices and M+)
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Beyond public-facing galleries, the partnership introduces an immersive framework for professional staff exchange and shared scholarly development. This initiative is fuelled by the newly secured four-year postdoctoral fellowship funded by the Huo Family Foundation, founded by Yan Huo, a financier who is also the co-founder and chief investment officer of Capula Investment Management. Based within M+’s curatorial department, the Huo Research Fellow will contribute to the research and writing of exhibitions developed through this collaboration with a focus on 20th- and 21st-century Western and Asian art.
The alliance arrives at a pivotal moment of transformation for the Centre Pompidou. As its historic Paris home is under a temporary structural closure, the institution is ensuring its expansive national collection remains dynamically accessible across the globe. Over the past 25 years, Centre Pompidou has strategically expanded its international presence, nurturing a constellation of venues that spans from Málaga to major new regional branches, including Massy in Île-de-France and Centre Pompidou Hanwha in Seoul, which is slated for opening in June.
For Raffel, participating in this global expansion is an institutional milestone. “To be a part [of a global partnership] when Centre Pompidou reopens is a huge honour. It’s about how the two institutions move forward,” she says. “As museums, we are building knowledge around lived environments, histories, geographies and the complexities in a very complicated world now. Museums are a place of refuge, respite and well-being. I hope we learn something from each other, and the only way to be productive, moving forward, is to share and collaborate.”
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Zabrina is the Senior Editor, Arts and Culture of Tatler Hong Kong. She specialises in performing arts, visual art and film. Her wanderlust was first fuelled by the Mighty Rovers Antarctica Expedition 2010. Over the years, she has interviewed A-list artists and filmmakers, including Oscar winners Chlóe Zhao and Tim Yip, Golden Horse winner Sylvia Chang, In the Mood for Love cinematographer Christopher Doyle, Pachinko author Min Jin Lee, and Coachella’s first Chinese solo singer Jackson Wang. She won gold at the WAN-IFRA Asian Media Awards for her 2021 feature on the waves of hate crimes targeting Asian Americans.
