- Suhanya Raffel and John Wickremeratne of Hong Kong’s M+ Museum of Visual Culture
Artists alone do not create art and drive movements and shifts in creative and social thinking. They are one very important part of a creative ecosystem that works to help them create the most powerful art possible. This ecosystem is built up of many people, creative and otherwise, who facilitate artists and their craft – curators, art managers, and gallerists, to name a few – and work tirelessly within the creative sector to drive impactful art.
Hong Kong recently saw the opening of one of its largest visual culture developments to date, the M+ Museum for Visual Culture. A development that houses an international-scale gallery akin to New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), M+ is now among Hong Kong’s most iconic landmarks, both monumental in its architectural form and radically open in its position in the urban landscape.
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M+ Museum Director Suhanya Raffel | PHOTO © FT HONG KONG[/caption]
Interestingly, the M+ story sees two Sri Lankans at its core, Suhanya Raffel (M+ Museum Director) and John Wickremaratne (M+ Deputy Director – Museum Operations), who in their work are supporting art and artists across Asia and contributing to creating an Asian visual cultural identity that can compete on the global stage.
The broader story of M+
The M+ building in the West Kowloon Cultural District is one of the largest museums of modern and contemporary visual culture in the world. Located at the southernmost edge of Kowloon overlooking Victoria Harbour and designed by Swiss architecture practice Herzog & de Meuron in partnership with TFP Farrells and Arup, the building is composed of a podium and a slender tower that fuse into the shape of an upside-down ‘T’. The M+ Facade, facing the harbour, is embedded with LEDs for screening moving image works, which can be seen from the West Kowloon waterfront promenade and Hong Kong Island.
The building includes 17,000 square metres of exhibition space across 33 galleries, three cinema houses, the Mediatheque, Learning Hub, and Roof Garden that faces Victoria Harbour. The tower houses the museum’s Research Centre, offices, and restaurants, set across a highly-accessible space that offers continuity between indoor and outdoor areas.
Giving us a little more insight into how M+ and all its parts came to be, Museum Director Raffel shared that the museum was part of establishing the West Kowloon Cultural District – one of the largest and most ambitious cultural projects in the world. Its vision is to create a vibrant new cultural quarter for Hong Kong on 40 hectares of reclaimed land located alongside Victoria Harbour. With a mix of theatres, performance spaces, and museums, the West Kowloon Cultural District produces and hosts world-class exhibitions, performances, and cultural events. When complete, it will provide 23 hectares of public open space, including a two-kilometre waterfront promenade.
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3. M+ | PHOTO © Virgile Simon Bertrand[/caption]
M+ is one of the landmark developments of the West Kowloon Cultural District. “As a museum of visual culture, M+ shows and engages with many disciplines and areas of art and design, from architecture to moving images to visual art to ink arts,” Raffel told Brunch. “M+’s ambition, as an institution, is to see its location as informing all the work we do. It is the first institution of its kind in Asia, there’s nothing like it in Tokyo, Seoul, Shanghai, or the other big Asian cities, and this is very important to us because we need institutions equivalent to the great Western institutions like the MoMA or the Centre Pompidou that can speak to our stories and histories.”
Helming a landmark institution for Asian visual culture
As Museum Director, what M+ showcases and how they showcase it comes under Raffel’s purview, with Raffel working with a team of curators to make M+ and its offerings stand on par with the global visual culture giants. “What’s interesting and important to say with M+, is that it’s not only establishing a new building (which is one of the largest in the world), but also about establishing museum culture here in Hong Kong and doing them in parallel. It’s a very large undertaking to pull together. Fundamentally, it's like a very large startup.”
In her role, Raffel needs to establish all kinds of principles and frameworks in how the museum works, from governance and strategy to fundraising and ensuring curatorial content and collection development is undertaken with clear policy and oversight. “At M+, I bring a network to the institution, direct the exhibition schedule, that strategy of what we show and how we should show it, which I work very closely on the curators,” Raffel summarised, concluding: “The buck stops with me.”
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5. Art from M+'s inaugural exhibition | PHOTO © 1kmStudio/Kevin Mak[/caption]
This all needs to happen in a world that has been rocked by the pandemic. M+ opened its doors in November 2021 and since then has seen over 380,000 people come through and visit a museum in a city that is still very closed (even to mainland China) and strictly implementing Covid-19 regulations. “It’s been extremely affirming to see the public response to the institution in the two months we were open,” Raffel said, noting that the museum was closed till mid-February because of the Omicron variant currently making the rounds in Hong Kong.
Expanding on her hopes for the success of M+, Raffel said that, to her, the success of M+ would be fostering the intangible things museum culture provides – a sense of community, both locally and regionally, and even globally, and Asian artists owning the work they do. “I hope M+ is able to establish a new canon of Asian visual culture and become part of an international network of scholarship and knowledge building.”
The other side of building a museum
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M+ Deputy Director – Museum Operations John Wickremaratne[/caption]
The other Sri Lankan who plays an integral part in the M+ story is Deputy Director – Museum Operations John Wickremaratne. A banker and accountant by formal definition, Wickremaratne has long been drawn to art and has worked indirectly within the arts and culture sector for approximately 30 years, working his way up to Chief Operating Officer at Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney before taking up his current position at M+.
His passion for working within art and culture came from a position at the Australia Council (an organisation not unlike the British Council) that saw him manage a fund for artists and become part and parcel of assessing artistic applications, making sure those applications went to the right places and that artists who were selected were properly supported administratively.
“As you work in the arts, you start to appreciate it. You don’t need to be a scholar,” Wickremaratne shared, adding that as an accountant, working with artists still meant that you had to be creative: “You can’t be an accountant in the true sense when working in the arts. You need to think laterally and about the final outcome. You can’t just throw the book at curators and say you’ll run at a loss.”
As Deputy Director – Museum Operations, Wickremaratne’s role sees him leave curating entirely to the experts. Where his creativity comes in is how he manages and create the financial and administrative structure that can support the art – from budgeting to fundraising and finding ways to effectively tell the financial story to non-financial people, with Wickremaratne quipping, “I’m always dealing with artists and curators who have fantastic skills in art and curating but not necessarily in finance and learning to speak their language is how I get to be creative.”
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4. Art from M+'s inaugural exhibition PHOTO South Lok Cheng[/caption]
Outside the financial support and framework Wickremaratne creates for M+, he is also responsible for the hundreds of little physical and administrative things that go into running a museum. “My job is to look after everything that’s not related to the art side of M+ and its businesses,” he explained, adding: “Budgeting, security, managing all the restaurants, cafes and shops at M+, venue operations, backup support, technical stuff. Including contracts, I manage a staff of 200 with direct reports.”
There is a lot that happens behind the scenes at a museum, especially one like M+ that has other businesses operating within it as well, and it is making sure all these different businesses run smoothly in conjunction with M+ that Wickremaratne has to see to. One major thing Wickremaratne has to see to is security – M+ has over 500 cameras with a 24/7 control room making sure the museum stays secure (Wickremaratne did note that Hong Kong, in general, is not a high-risk location for art theft, but security is still a top priority for M+) – and the loading dock. “The loading dock is one of the most important things and if something goes wrong, for example, an art collection coming in while Food and Beverage is going, it can lead to disaster.”
The growing pains of building a museum
Sharing what has challenged him most about the M+ journey, Wickramaratne shared that his headaches were more construction-related (the project was four years late) and making sure that customer expectations were managed once M+ was open (it is still not completely open, some areas of the building are still under construction, and the people of Hong Kong have been waiting for years to see what M+ and its space within the West Kowloon Cultural District will finally look like).
The pandemic, of course, did present many challenges to both Wickremaratne and Raffel, mainly because of the closing of borders, which affected the supply chain, causing problems from Wickremaratne’s perspective, and from Rafffel’s perspective, the pandemic made curating and managing collections, especially from the different parts of Asia, that much harder.
Both Raffel and Wickremaratne agreed that these challenges pale when looking at the rewards of building a visual culture like M+.
For Raffel, being able to work with a diverse group of people, many of whom are young professionals, has been immensely rewarding. For Wickremaratne, it is being able to walk through the galleries, see the art, see that what he has been working towards has come to pass, and see how the museum is engaging with people to build a stronger artistic culture.
