M+ is the new museum for visual culture in Hong Kong, as part of the West Kowloon Cultural District, focusing on 20th- and 21st-century art, design, architecture and the moving image. From day one, M+ is set to develop content ‘from a Hong Kong perspective, the perspective of the “now”, and with a global vision’, from the “inside out”. The physical design of its 60,000-square-metre building would be shaped around the ideas, vision and, eventually, contents formulated now and in the coming years through programmes such as “Mobile M+: Yau Ma Tei”. It is a project with a strong public service ethos, not primarily envisioned as a prestigious venture or a tourist project, but fundamentally as a museum for the more than seven million people living and working in Hong Kong, firmly rooted in the location and its unique culture.

While this goal is by no means unique compared to that of many museums around the world, the cultural ecology which M+ will be a part of has other traditions, histories and experiences than those that engendered today’s leading museums. By presenting its collection in innovative ways through rich and diverse exhibition and education programmes, the future M+ building (scheduled for completion at the end of 2017) will be the optimal meeting point for various parties with exceedingly disparate requirements, encouraging enhanced audience participation and dialogue between different forms of visual culture, and cultures of "looking". The building, therefore, for now and the foreseeable future, remains to be the museum’s main tool. Its symbolic significance today is greater than ever especially with the cultural genres growing ever more fluid and mutant.