Chanel Becomes Lead Partner With Hong Kong’s M+ Museum

Chanel has become a lead partner of Hong Kong’s M+ museum, extending the Parisian luxury fashion brand’s collaboration with the museum for three years and broadening the partnership to include exhibitions, public programmes and projects drawing on the museum’s collection.

The extension introduces Pioneering Visions, a series focused mainly on artists from Hong Kong, Greater China and elsewhere in Asia, as well as practices connected to the region. It will include gallery presentations, talks, screenings and workshops, alongside a new digital hub on artists and works in the M+ Collections.

Discussing the new series, Suhanya Raffel, director of M+, told Ocula: “Pioneering Visions goes beyond celebrating individual artists and makers, it reflects M+’s ongoing commitment to uncovering, contextualising and foregrounding artistic practices that embody the multidisciplinary nature of contemporary visual culture. 

“We are particularly interested in transformative artists and makers whose groundbreaking practices continue to shift [the] global visual cultural landscape. Examining their work allows us to trace interconnected histories and networks of creative exchange that redefined contemporary art in Asia.”

The programme includes a presentation of Centrifuge (2017) by American artist Sarah Sze, whose installations assemble everyday objects and moving images. On display from 5 February 2027, the work is built around a roughly semi-circular bamboo framework hung with torn paper screens. Videos of sunsets, flowing water and a sleeping child play across them, while electric fans make the paper flutter.

Commissioned by Okwui Enwezor for Haus der Kunst in Munich and now in the M+ Collection, the work will be shown for the first time since 2017. Sze will also make a new work for the M+ Facade, the huge light-powered canvas visble from 1.5km away.

Raffel described Sze as a “groundbreaking artist”, whose practice “continuously expanded the possibilities of spatial and visual experience”. She added: “By incorporating moving image into her distinctive sculptural language, Sze blurs the boundaries between material and virtual worlds.”

Chanel first partnered with M+ in 2023, supporting a curatorial position, film restoration and the development of the museum’s moving image collection. Sponsorship is one of M+’s revenue sources, alongside admissions, donations and commercial activities.

The partnership has supported M+ Restored, which has restored nine Hong Kong feature films. It has also supported the Asian Avant-Garde Film Collection—around half of the 60 moving image works recently acquired for the collection come from Hong Kong. They have been digitised for festival presentations and public viewing at the museum’s Mediatheque, and selections are touring international festivals and cultural venues.

All nine restored films will return to M+ Cinema for the M+ Restored Festival this November. A new cycle planned for 2027 will present six films from across Asia.

The renewed partnership also continues Chanel’s support for Chinese and Asian art through research and new commissions in the region, as well as acquisitions overseas.

In Shanghai, the brand’s longstanding partnership with the Power Station of Art includes exhibition programmes on craft and architecture, and a public contemporary art library that opened in Espace Gabrielle Chanel in November 2025. Chanel’s support for Chinese art also extends to the Pompidou Centre in Paris, where a three-year agreement signed in 2025 is bolstering the institutions’s Chinese art acquisitions.