Canton Modern: Art and Visual Culture, 1900s–1970s

M+, Asia’s global museum of contemporary visual culture in the West Kowloon Cultural District (WestK) in Hong Kong, is pleased to present Canton Modern: Art and Visual Culture, 1900s–1970s. This Special Exhibition showcases twentieth-century Cantonese art and visual culture in its full complexity, as an important chapter in global visual and artistic modernism. Featuring more than 180 works drawn from private and institutional collections, many on public display for the first time, Canton Modern will be on view in M+’s Main Hall Gallery from June 28 through October 5, 2025.

Canton Modern tells a locally rooted story that reflects issues of contemporary and global resonance, including individual and collective identities, the meaning of images in a changing society, and the politics of culture. As the birthplace of China’s modern revolution, the port cities of Guangzhou (Canton) and Hong Kong were also centres for radically new ways of thinking about art and its purpose in the twentieth century. Cantonese artists departed from the elegant poetics of classical ink painting to create a new socially oriented realism, depicting subjects ranging from leisure and labour to war and disaster. They worked as journalists and publishers, using mass media like pictorials, photography, and cartoons to reflect and even reform society. After the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, Guangdong and Hong Kong went on divergent paths. Cantonese artists in mainland China shaped the nation’s self-image through Socialist Realism and propaganda, while their contemporaries in Hong Kong continued to embrace international movements. Nonetheless, a complex sympathy endured, grounded in a shared artistic legacy.

Canton Modern spans the Xinhai Revolution (1911), which overthrew the Qing dynasty (1644–1911); the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945); the Chinese Civil War (1945–1949); the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949; and the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). In this historical context, Cantonese modernism gained political urgency and social purpose. It was also animated by tensions between conservative and progressive art worlds, a distinctive feature of Guangdong’s unique status—on the cultural periphery within China, yet open to the world. Proposing a broad understanding of Cantonese modernism, the exhibition puts in dialogue works in different media and styles. It encompasses Cantonese artists with national or international careers, including printmakers of the New Woodcut Movement, painters of the Lingnan School, and artists from elsewhere working in Guangdong after 1949. Building on recent research into multiple modernisms, Canton Modern links early-twentieth-century artistic developments to propaganda and Socialist Realism in the People’s Republic of China and to post-war leftist and modernist art in Hong Kong.

Canton Modern is divided into four chapters, each structured around a dynamic tension. Image and Reality explores the notion of realism and the dynamics between image and reality, a theme that underpins the entire exhibition. Identity and Gender examines the conflicts between private and public selves and the struggles against traditional social and gender roles. Locality and Nationhood considers the relationship between Guangdong and China as a whole. Parallel Worlds explores the connections and disconnections between Guangzhou and Hong Kong after 1949 as well as the social divisions within each place. It is in this moment that the relationship between image and reality grows even more fragile: realism becomes fictional, theatrical, and utopian.

Canton Modern is curated by Tina Pang, Curator, Hong Kong Visual Culture, and Alan Yeung, Associate Curator, Ink Art, with the support of Wen Bi, Assistant Curator, Design and Architecture, and Yannis Lo, Curatorial Assistant, Hong Kong Visual Culture. The exhibition is generously supported by Major Sponsor HSBC.