Untitled (2003) by Wang Xingwei is in the M+ Collections, but what is it, who made it, and why did M+ acquire it? Isabella Tam, Associate Curator, Visual Art, M+, explains:

What is this?

Untitled is a painting by Chinese artist Wang Xingwei. It depicts a panda sitting on a lavish chair in a green meadow, having a leisurely moment with wine and other delicacies. While the gradation of green and white in the background evokes a sense of afternoon light, there are no other visible clues to further contextualise the scene.

What is live cinema? Unlike a traditional film screening, live cinema is a performance in which artists experiment and improvise with the moving images on display. M+ recently held the museum’s first ever live cinema event, Haunting Images: Live Cinema by Lim Giong, inviting Taiwanese composer and musician Lim Giong to create live sonic and musical scoring to the images on screen. Lim started working in the late '80s and early '90s as a boundary-pushing electronic musician, and over the decades, he has developed his practice to include film scoring, thinking about moving images in a very particular way.

For Haunting Images, he put together a programme of moving image works including three works selected from the M+ Collections. Below, we show how Lim scored these works, and why.

1. Static No. 23 (Revolve) (2017) by Daniel Crooks

In her Hollian Thesaurus series, photographer Holly Lee muses on the past and future of Hong Kong around the time of the transfer of sovereignty in 1997. The series consists of twelve conceptual photographs created between 1994 and 2000, touching on this period of intense change.

Thanks to digital technology, the ’90s was a period when conceptual photography flourished in Hong Kong, and Lee was among the pioneers who expanded the language of photography during this time. She experimented with Photoshop to create the Hollian Thesaurus in a type of photography known as composite photography. To create the series, Lee combined straight photography, photographic-sourced imagery, digital manipulation, and 19th century export painting from Guangdong.

We’re in the middle of the Year of the Dog, so what better time to take a look at some of the great dogs you can find in the M+ Collections? We’ve got it all: happy dogs, pensive dogs, dogs on video, dogs on canvas, and even a robot dog.

1. Sony’s AIBO entertainment robot dog 🤖🐶