We are thrilled to launch the M+ website, the digital home of Hong Kong’s new museum of visual culture. We designed this site to be as welcoming, dynamic, and vibrant as the city itself. Here, you can explore our collections, get to know the artists and makers who inspire us, and learn more about how and why we built this museum. If you stick around over the next few weeks and months, you will notice these features expand. Our online home will become a digital gateway to everything M+ has to offer.

The bold colours and animated style of this site create a visual environment meant to be as distinctive as the architecture of our building. Over the years, many in Hong Kong have watched the construction of M+ in the West Kowloon Cultural District. Designed by Herzog & de Meuron with TFP Farrells and Arup, the building is an iconic addition to the skyline. We know visitors will be excited to discover our galleries, cinemas, and learning spaces (not to mention our restaurants and shops) when we welcome the public later this year.

A museum is also more than a physical space. A museum is the objects in its collections, the people who care for them, and the communities that activate its programmes. While our physical home was under construction, we have been busy building a museum in this broader sense.

This has meant assembling and studying works of design and architecture, moving image, and visual art with a focus on highlighting Hong Kong visual culture. We have hosted programmes in schools and exhibition spaces, online and in real life, to share our mission with audiences in Hong Kong, Greater China, Asia, and around the world.

Our digital presence has been central to these efforts. The Collection Online interface you can browse today builds on the Collections Beta initiative we launched in 2018 to provide broad public access to information about the M+ collections. M+ Magazine brings together the blog posts and videos previously featured on M+ Stories, launched in 2017, as well as the in-depth articles published in our digital journal, Podium.

This new site makes it easier than ever to engage with these diverse projects. Accessibility is a core value that drove our design and development process. Our content is available in Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, and English. The images we publish include alt text in English and Chinese for visitors who prefer to use a screen reader. We meet rigorous accessibility standards for design, and in the coming years M+ is committed to raising those standards so that our online programmes can be truly open to all.

Everyone who makes a museum work contributed to the site, including digital producers, technologists, and developers, as well as curators, registrars, and learning specialists. We were fortunate to work with a global network of talented collaborators. Anton & Irene designed this site with reference to a visual identity by Thonik. Behind the scenes, we create our publications with a customised system for managing content built by Torchbox.

We invite you to delve into the site and tell us what you think about it. M+ is a new institution with a clear mission to become a global hub for visual culture in Asia. This website is a place to start.

— the M+ Digital and Editorial Content Team