M+ Live Art: Audience as Performer

Free admission. No registration is required for performance programmes.

Friday, June 1, 7:30–10pm
Saturday, June 2, 12–7pm
Sunday, June 3, 12–5:30pm

Public Programmes:
Artists in Conversation: Performance and Social Change in Hong Kong
June 2, 5:30–7pm, online registration required

Painting with Spices: Artist Workshop with Tisna Sanjaya
June 3, 3–4pm, online registration required

Audience as Performer is the inaugural exhibition of M+ Live Art, the museum’s first series dedicated to performance art, highlighting and unpacking the concept of the live body in visual art through compelling performances from local and international artists. Spread over three days, M+ Live Art: Audience as Performer features works by five artists from Asia who engage directly with the viewer, shifting the role of the audience from passive witness to active participant. By offering collaborations in new and open-ended works of art, the exhibition inspires the public to build social bonds through artistic production and collective action.

M+ Live Art: Audience as Performer features new commissions by two Hong Kong artists, wen yau and Isaac Chong Wai, whose works express the lived experiences of the city’s inhabitants facing shifting social realities. In A Drop and Two Dots: Everything Must Go! (Homage to All Peaceful Revolutionaries), wen yau focuses on a local context to examine the meaning of belonging to one’s land. In Rehearsal of the Futures: Police Training Exercises, Isaac Chong Wai addresses the history of protests around the world, considering how acts of confrontation can also be viewed as beautiful and gentle gestures.

Equally dedicated to addressing societal concerns is Indonesian artist Tisna Sanjaya, who uses traditional rituals as means of uncovering social injustices. In his work 99 Sajadah Merah, he welcomes members of the audience to traverse a sprawling installation with him in a collective form of art making, to encourage tolerance and cooperation.

Taiwanese artist River Lin’s work is also concerned with notions of ritual and the relationship between the body and time in site-specific social spaces. His work Cleansing Service offers one-on-one dialogue through a series of prescribed actions and personal exchanges.

Duan Yingmei continues the exploration of conversations and introspection with her work My Hong Kong Friends. Seeking connections to others by observing human instincts such as desire, fear, and love, Duan leads the audience on a journey that offers personal stories and creative, imagined worlds.

M+ Live Art: Audience as Performer invites the public to experience the transformative potential of the works of these five artists and consider the role of the audience as agent and producer of artistic meaning for new and unexpected encounters that not only live in the moment, but also are shared as collective memories for the future.

Alongside live performances, the exhibition includes an artist talk and an artist-led workshop that further expand the viewers’ experiences to encourage exchanges of ideas and perspectives on this ephemeral art form.

Presented as a semi-annual series, M+ Live Art offers audiences direct access to the artists through their live, immediate, and ephemeral performances. M+ Live Art acts as a catalyst to spark curiosity and expand thinking, engagement, and dialogue with the Hong Kong public about performance as a mode of artistic expression. Through the convergence of disciplines in performance art, such as visual art, dance, technology, sound, and moving image, the series contributes to the interdisciplinary ethos of M+ as a museum of visual culture and as a place for new and diverse cultural experiences.

About M+
M+ is a new museum dedicated to collecting, exhibiting, and interpreting visual culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Within Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District, we are building one of the largest museums of modern and contemporary visual culture in the world, with a bold ambition to establish ourselves in a short time as one of the world’s leading cultural institutions.

About West Kowloon Cultural District
Located on Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour, the West Kowloon Cultural District is one of the largest cultural projects in the world. Its vision is to create a vibrant new cultural quarter for Hong Kong. With a complex of theatres, performance spaces, and M+, the West Kowloon Cultural District will produce and host world-class exhibitions, performances, and cultural events, as well as provide twenty-three hectares of public open space, including a two-kilometre waterfront promenade.