MoMA’s announcement last month that it has entered into a partnership to share artwork and whole exhibitions with Hong Kong’s four-year-old M+ modern art museum represents another cultural win for one of China’s most prosperous cities. It would seem to be a win for MoMA, too, as that institution will now have greater access to notable East Asian artists and to deep-pocketed collectors in Hong Kong. This new partnership takes place just months before the Guggenheim Museum completes its long-awaited outpost in the United Arab Emirates, Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, which is expected to open next year. Like Hong Kong, Abu Dhabi is a city with immensely wealthy residents, some of whom may be art collectors and potential donors to the Guggenheim, which recently laid off twenty employees in order to shore up its finances back at its home institution in New York City.
The attractiveness of Hong Kong and Abu Dhabi to these two New York museums is obvious, but so are the potential risks. While art institutions in Manhattan have a free hand in displaying whatever artworks they choose, the same may not be true in China or the UAE, where nudity, anti-government images or images seen as offensive to Islam and other manifestations of speech are prohibited. “Displaying any artwork that touches on political topics in the Gulf region is nearly impossible,” Saudi Arabian artist Abdulnasser Gharem told Observer. In 2017, his painting Prosperity Without Growth (which included a brief text that referenced the war in Yemen in which both the UAE and Saudi Arabia were involved) was “removed approximately an hour before the opening” of the Abu Dhabi Art Fair on the orders of fair officials. The painting was in the booth of Cologne, Germany-based dealer Brigitte Schenk.
A less harsh assessment was offered by Leila Heller, a dealer with galleries in both New York City and Dubai whose roster includes Middle Eastern artists. “I’ve shown any artist I want, and no one has ever tried to stop me,” she told Observer.
Hong Kong’s crackdown on artwork that defies official government policies and the artists who create it has been more all-encompassing. For instance, a sculpture memorializing the victims of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown in Beijing was removed from the University of Hong Kong campus in 2021, and late last year, Clarisse Yeung, a Hong Kong artist, pro-democracy activist and former elected member of the city’s district council, was sentenced to six years in prison for “subversion” under the country’s national security law. The special administrative region, which already hosts major auctions by Bonhams, Christie’s, Phillips and Sotheby’s, will be welcoming visitors to the 2025 edition of Art Basel Hong Kong later this month. Balancing its intentions of being seen as a sophisticated city and maintaining tight social controls is a challenge for its leaders and now also for the Museum of Modern Art.
“China is complicated,” said Gordon VeneKlasen, co-owner of New York City’s Michael Werner Gallery, which will have a booth in this month’s Art Basel Hong Kong. “It’s not easy to do shows in China because you need to get approval” for every work on display. At an art exhibit in Beijing in the recent past at the M Woods Museums, government officials demanded the removal of one painting that showed an animal eating a human arm, but that was an exception because “we know what not to bring. You show there enough times, you know not to push things too far.”
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Manhattan gallery owner Eli Klein, who specializes in contemporary Asian art, also noted that “government minders” do appear at art fairs and that “art doesn’t completely get a pass” in terms of content. “There are different rules, different cultural norms. The Chinese are wary of nudes. Offensive images of Mao generally are prohibited, as are mentions of Tiananmen Square,” he said, but added that “the situation in Hong Kong is relatively free-wheeling” and that the “problem of censorship of art in China has been overblown.”
The organizers of Art Basel Hong Kong put it even more plainly. “We have never faced censorship issues at our Hong Kong show,” a spokesperson told Observer. “Final artwork selections are at the discretion of participating galleries, guided by their own curatorial considerations.”
Experiences reported by artists, auctioneers, dealers, fair organizers and museum curators working in regions where censorship is a concern differ widely, and it’s worth noting that there may not be overt government suppression of creativity in places where the pressure to self-censor is high. Abdulnasser Gharem said that he is “currently working on a solo exhibition at the YUZ Museum in Shanghai. The first step I was required to take was to submit all my artworks with a detailed explanation of every quote and phrase included in them, along with references that would provide additional context. Following this, the Chinese government will issue a permit for the approved works, and then we will proceed to organize the exhibition based on the accepted pieces.”
Officials at the Guggenheim and MoMA did not respond to questions pertaining to whether or not local government approval will need to be obtained before certain artworks or entire exhibitions are shown. Perhaps, as Gordon VeneKlasen suggested, curators at these New York museums already know what not to exhibit to stay on the right side of the law. Perhaps a more far-reaching concern for the Museum of Modern Art is how tenable its position will be if China invades Taiwan, which it has regularly threatened to do, or if competing trade concerns between China and the United States lead to increased tension or even hostilities. Beyond that, concerns around the censorship of art prompt a different kind of question: Can cultural partnerships and institutional expansions into regions with restrictions on expression result in opportunities to secure more artistic independence for those creating under a degree of government control? That remains to be seen.