Chanel is deepening its relationship with Hong Kong’s M+ museum, signing on as its lead partner for the next three years and expanding its support beyond film to exhibitions, artist programs, and other projects.
The French luxury house has backed M+, the contemporary visual culture museum in Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District, since 2023. The partnership has until now mostly focused on experimental cinema, film restoration, and building the museum’s moving-image collection. The new agreement, announced Wednesday, will bring Chanel into a much broader range of the museum’s activities.
At the center of the deal is a new initiative called “Pioneering Visions,” which will spotlight artists whose work has helped shape contemporary art and visual culture, particularly those from Hong Kong, mainland China, and across in Asia.
The first exhibition under the program will be Sarah Sze: Centrifuge, a solo presentation opening at the museum’s M+ Focus Gallery in February 2027. The initiative will also include artist talks, screenings, workshops, and an online platform featuring works from the museum’s collection.
Financial terms of the expanded partnership were not disclosed.
For Chanel, the agreement marks another step in its growing involvement with major cultural institutions through the Chanel Culture Fund, which also supports programs at the British Film Institute, Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof, and the Venice Biennale.
Yana Peel, Chanel’s president of arts, culture, and heritage, described M+ in a statement as one of the company’s earliest institutional arts partners in Asia and praised the museum’s role in establishing Hong Kong as an international cultural center.
“Now, after successful programmes focused on moving image, we are [broadening] our scope.” She added that “M+ is so much more than a museum: it is the epicenter for dialogue within Asia and between Asia and the world.”
The partnership has already produced some tangible results. Since 2023, Chanel has supported the restoration of nine Hong Kong feature films, which have since been shown at more than 130 screenings around the world. The museum has also acquired 60 experimental moving-image works, roughly half of them from Hong Kong.
Chanel has also supported a senior curatorial position dedicated to moving image and the museum’s Asian Avant-Garde Film Festival, which has attracted more than 10,300 participants across three editions since 2024.
Those efforts will continue under the new agreement. All nine restored films are scheduled to screen at M+ in November, while another six films from across Asia are due to be released through the restoration program in 2027.
M+ director Suhanya Raffel said in a statement the expanded partnership would allow the museum to move beyond its initial emphasis on cinema and explore connections between different artistic disciplines.
The announcement comes as M+, which opened in 2021, approaches its fifth anniversary. Designed by Herzog & de Meuron, the waterfront museum houses more than 9,000 works spanning contemporary art, design, architecture, and moving image, including the M+ Sigg Collection of Chinese contemporary art.