The best things to see and do during Hong Kong Arts Month

As is the case during Arts Month each year, local and international artists will gather to give our streets a colourful makeover with various street art pieces and murals. Last year’s edition featured artists such as Maye, Jaune, Michal Škapa, Hong Kong’s own elusive Lousy, and more. The striking murals along Tai Ping Shan’s Rich View Terrace and Wa In Fong in Sheung Wan created a few editions ago are still some of our favourite public art pieces in the city. The murals are available for all to view on our streets, but HKwalls usually also hosts a lineup of digital art displays, workshops, panel discussions, and other events, so keep an eye out!

Art Central is back as one of Hong Kong’s Art Month highlights – and this year’s edition is particularly special as it is their 10th anniversary. Hit up their specially designed tent at Central Harbourfront to find a host of new programmes such as a sector dedicated to established artists born before 1970; Duo Projects, which pairs together the works of artists for deeper understanding on their art pieces; a specially curated host of video programmes, and brand-new lecture-performances. This year also sees the inclusion of some big names in the art world, such as Ay-O, Dean-E Mei, May Fung, and more.

This is the first time that treasures from the Forbidden City and the Palace of Versailles – both World Heritage Sites – will be featured in one exhibition in Hong Kong. With themes spanning culture, arts, science, technology, and beyond in the royal courts of France and China, visitors can expect to admire portraits, porcelain pieces, glassware, enamelware, textiles, books, scientific instruments, and more.

Look out for first-grade national treasures from the Palace Museum in Beijing, such as a chrysanthemum teapot gifted to the Qianlong Emperor that was recently discovered to be made in France. Highlights flown over from the Palace of Versailles include a perfume fountain – the only Chinese porcelain piece that Louis XV was known to have owned – and a portrait plaque of Qianlong that Louis XVI had displayed in his study.

The famous Musée d’Orsay and Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris have collaborated with the Hong Kong Museum of Art to present this special exhibition on two of the greatest masters of the Impressionist art movement: Paul Cézanne and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. 

This is the first large-scale exhibition of the two Impressionists in Hong Kong, showcasing 52 masterpieces on loan from France. See how the pair found innovative ways to reinvent the art of their time, how they viewed the world, and how they captured the rapidly changing times around them. Cézanne and Renoir were also longtime friends and likely influenced each other’s works, as well as later becoming beacons of inspiration for later painters such as Spanish surrealist master Pablo Picasso.

Visit this special exhibition at M+ to see more than 60 masterpieces by Spanish artist Pablo Picasso spanning from the late 1890s to the early 1970s. Co-curated with the Musée national Picasso-Paris (MnPP), which holds the largest repository of Picasso’s work in the world, this is the first time that pieces from the MnPP are being shown together with works from an Asian museum collection. By placing Picasso’s work in dialogue with Asian contemporary art – approximately 80 works by more than 20 Asian and Asian-diasporic artists – the master’s enduring influence on art to this day is highlighted.

Split into four sections that show how Picasso fits into four artist stereotypes – such as the genius in his self-mythologising works, and the outsider with how he consistently chose to upend artistic styles and traditions – this exhibition explores how Picasso became the quintessential modern 20th-century artist.