Chanel Becomes Lead Partner of Hong Kong's M+ Museum for Three More Years
Chanel has signed on as lead partner of Hong Kong's M+ museum for the next three years, and its support is growing well beyond film. ArtNews reported the expanded partnership on 21 October 2026.
M+ is a museum of visual culture in the West Kowloon Cultural District, an arts complex on Hong Kong's waterfront. It opened in 2021, was designed by the Swiss architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron, and holds more than 9,000 works. Its collection includes the M+ Sigg Collection of Chinese contemporary art. The museum's director is Suhanya Raffel.
Chanel, the French fashion house, has supported M+ since 2023. That first three-year partnership focused on moving images, meaning film and video work, and on the museum's film restoration programme, which repairs old films so they can be seen again. Since then, Chanel has backed the restoration of nine Hong Kong feature films. Those films have been shown at more than 130 screenings around the world.
The partnership has also helped build the museum's film collection. M+ has acquired 60 experimental moving-image works through it, roughly half of them from Hong Kong. Chanel has supported a senior curator's post for moving image at M+, and the museum's Asian Avant-Garde Film Festival. The festival has drawn more than 10,300 participants across three editions since 2024.
The new phase adds exhibitions and artist projects. It centres on a new initiative called Pioneering Visions, which will highlight artists whose work helped shape contemporary art and visual culture. The focus is on Hong Kong, mainland China and the rest of Asia. The first show under the initiative is a solo exhibition by the artist Sarah Sze, titled Centrifuge. It opens at M+'s Focus Gallery in February 2027.
Chanel's Culture Fund also supports programmes at the British Film Institute in London, Berlin's Hamburger Bahnhof museum and the Venice Biennale, one of the world's oldest art exhibitions. Yana Peel is Chanel's president of arts, culture and heritage.
Film fans have dates to note. All nine restored Hong Kong films are scheduled to screen at M+ in November. Six more films from across Asia are due to be released through the restoration programme in 2027. Earlier this month, M+ held a festival celebrating the nine restored films' journeys around the world, and their return home.
The financial terms of the expanded partnership were not disclosed.
