Visitors have flooded back to Hong Kong’s museums as the lockdowns and travel restrictions in the Special Administrative Region have come to an end.
Since opening in 2021, M+ has become Hong Kong’s most popular art museum. In 2023 it received 2.8 million visitors—38% more than in 2022, when it was closed for 89 days due to the pandemic—placing M+ among the top 20 most-visited art museums in the world, according to The Art Newspaper’s annual visitor figures survey published this month, with more visitors than the venerable Uffizi galleries in Florence and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. It was the second-most visited Asian art museum, after the National Museum of Korea in Seoul. However, figures for many mainland Chinese museums were unavailable at the time of the survey, so they are likely to be superseded by institutions including Beijing’s Palace Museum.
The nearby Hong Kong Palace Museum, which opened in 2022, had its first full year, receiving just under 1.3 million visitors, as did the Hong Kong Museum of Art—a figure nearly triple the number of visitors it received in 2022. The museum moved to a new building in November 2019, just before the pandemic.
• Read more from our exclusive Visitor Figures 2023 survey