At Tai Kwun Centre in Hong Kong
A week and a half later, I’m back in Hong Kong. And this time I did see a lot of really good art.
The first night, I stayed at the Lanson Place Hotel, in Causeway Bay, part of one of my favorite group of hotels: Small Luxury Hotels of the World.
I arrived into Hong Kong late… but it’s (almost) never too late to enjoy art, so I headed to Tai Kwun Centre for Heritage and Arts, which is open from 11am to 11pm every day.
Eight years in the making, it has cost the Hong Kong Jockey Club a staggering HK$3.8 billion, but it’s absolutely worth it. Housed in the colonial-era Central Police Station complex, it’s the biggest restoration project in Hong Kong: sixteen heritage buildings in the compound. Designed by architects Herzog de Meuron, who also dded two new buildings.
Hong Kong is home to many of the world’s leading commercial galleries (more on those in a future post) but has always lacked a museum-standard not-for-profit art space. Tai Kwun Contemporary fills that gap with more than 1500 square meters of exhibition space. I particularly enjoyed the JC Contemporary building, where I saw awesome exhibitions, like “Phantom Plane, Cyberpunk in the Year of Future”, and “Very Natural Actions”.
Before going back to the hotel for a business teleconference and some needed sleep, I had dinner at the Michelin Guide recommended Tsim Chai Kee Noodle.
