Keep It 100
For more than a decade, Adrian Cheng has been sculpting a multibillion-dollar cultural and retail hub on the TST waterfront. Now he’s ready to open Victoria Dockside and spill its secrets
For more than a decade, Adrian Cheng has been sculpting a multibillion-dollar cultural district on the Tsim Sha Tsui waterfront that comes with a social mission. With K11 Musea now complete, he’s ready to open the doors of Victoria Dockside and spill its secrets
Adrian Cheng wears many hats. Tycoon. Art patron. Philanthropist. The entrepreneur behind K11 Group. Executive director of jeweller Chow Tai Fook and executive vice-chairman of New World Development, his family’s international conglomerate. At one recent black-tie gala, his love for the finer things in life led one fellow partygoer to ignore all these and dub him the Great Gatsby of Asia. But the toughest job, he says, is one that’s often overlooked— that of fortune teller. “When it comes to buildings, what you’re looking at today was probably designed seven or eight years ago,” says Adrian. “So for a project to be relevant, we need to be looking ahead 20, 30 years into the future, sometimes more. And that’s the hardest part because people change, the paradigm shifts and it’s easy to be distracted.”
Adrian has spent the past 10 years resisting distraction because, quietly, he has been dreaming up his largest project yet: the US$2.6 billion redevelopment of Victoria Dockside on the Tsim Sha Tsui waterfront.
“This land was acquired by my grandfather, Cheng Yutung, in 1971, then both my grandfather and my father built New World Centre in 1978. It was an icon and a hub for Hong Kong in the 1980s and ’90s,” recalls Adrian, looking out over the site. New World Centre was a retail, hotel, residential and office complex—a multi-use model Adrian has kept for the redevelopment. Now the harbourfront development features a 65-storey tower designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF) that houses both a Rosewood hotel and K11 Atelier offices; the 21-storey K11 Artus, featuring luxury residences; and K11 Musea, an art, culture and retail complex that Adrian sees as the heart of the project—a place he hopes will inspire visitors.
“K11 Musea is more than a shopping centre. I see it as a Silicon Valley of culture, and a gift to Hong Kong’s next generation” says Adrian. “It’s a melting pot of creativity and a celebration of culture. Contemporary art, fashion, music, design, coffee, gastronomy, performance art—they’re all here. And it doesn’t feel like a mall—it feels like a manor house or an estate.”
To create this “Silicon Valley,” Adrian assembled a team of 100 leading creatives from around the world, each of whom he commissioned to design a particular aspect of K11 Musea. Architect Forth Bagley of KPF was given responsibility for the exterior of the distinctive stepped building, while lighting designers Speirs + Major calibrated thousands of individual bulbs inside to create the dreamy, soft lighting Adrian was after. Rising star
Otto Ng, founder of Hong Kong-based LAAB Architects, designed intricate metalwork that wraps around the vast atrium like banyan tree roots. Hong Kong-based studio AB Concept also contributed to the schematic design. “The design of K11 Musea is eclectic, but I selected designers who all embraced the same vision as me, then I just needed to guide them all in one direction,” says Adrian.
He has plenty of experience shepherding creatives. In 2009, Adrian launched K11, a series of malls in Hong Kong and Mainland China that blend art and commerce by hosting ambitious art exhibitions in the public space outside stores. And when Adrian took the reins of his family’s New World Development in 2012, he steered the company in a new direction with the launch of The Artisanal Movement, an effort to bring a human touch into luxury residential developments by commissioning artists and craftsmen from differing cultures to help design the properties. In one, The Pavilia Hill, he commissioned Zen priest and landscape architect Shunmyo Masuno to design a Japanese garden. For another, Artisan House, he commissioned a work of sound art from Hongkonger Samson Young that residents can listen to in the clubhouse.
All of this experience has shaped K11 Musea, as have many of Adrian’s personal passions. He is an avid collector of contemporary art and founded the K11 Art Foundation in 2010 to support artists working in Hong Kong and Mainland China. Recently, he also founded the Culture for Tomorrow charity and K11 Craft & Guild Foundation. The former aims to empower the next generation of creatives in Hong Kong, while the latter preserves and modernises fast-disappearing Chinese craftsmanship. “Collecting art is not just a buzzword or a trend to me—it’s much more than that. It’s a journey, it’s an adventure, it’s a discovery,” says Adrian. “Doesn’t looking at art give you the same experiences as when you go travelling? When you travel you learn more about a culture, you learn more about different people’s perspectives, you can learn about the history of a place—just as you do when you look at art. But art can have more of a long-lasting effect because art is physically there. If you collect it, you can see it every day.”
As with his K11 Art Foundation and K11 art malls, Adrian is using K11 Musea to share art with the public. Temporary exhibitions will be hosted at various locations inside the complex, and Adrian has acquired or commissioned several major works that will be on permanent display. Among these are a new sitespecific installation by mainland artist Zhang Enli, who painstakingly painted a domed ceiling inside K11 Musea with lush leaves. Hanging below the fresco are five sculptures of golden birds, each of which represents an element of Chinese philosophy. Some of the other art is more playful. There’s Hot Dog Bus by Erwin Wurm, a customised vintage Volkswagen van that bulges as if it has indulged in too much fast food; and Van Gogh’s Ear by Elmgreen & Dragset, a life-size kidney-shaped swimming pool that has been drained and placed upright. “Those are fun,” says Adrian. “Sometimes you need to be playful.
“K11 Musea is more than a shopping centre. I see it as a Silicon Valley of culture, and a gift to Hong Kong’s next generation”—adrian Cheng
“K11 Musea’s landscape architecture is art that goes beyond the physical. It blends culture, design, ecology, the environment, and history together”—wannaporn Phornprapha
K11 Musea is playful. K11 Musea is all about inspiring curiosity and creativity, and no one is curious when you’re depressed.”
Adrian has painstakingly curated much of the art himself, carefully choosing where each piece should go so there’s a dialogue between the art, the surrounding space and—where possible—nearby stores. The third floor of K11 Musea is dedicated to sneakers, collectable Kaws-style figurines and streetwear, so Adrian commissioned street artists from near and far, including local stars Simple Bao and Start From Zero and American street art legend Ron English, to create works directly on the walls, floors and even ceilings. “K11 Musea isn’t just for millennials or Gen Z or Gen X—we embrace everyone,” says Adrian. “But I am interested in millennials and younger generations because they are the future, so I want K11 Musea to feel relevant to them, and lots of them love streetwear. We have Off-white, Palm Angels, Stone Island—all these cool high-end streetwear stores.”
K11 Musea is home to more classic designer stores, too, but Adrian was very particular when it came to choosing tenants. Cartier, Van Cleef & Arpels, Gucci, Alexander Mcqueen and Loewe are just a few of the fashion and jewellery brands that have moved in, and K11 Musea is also home to the first Fortnum & Mason outside the UK and the first Museum of Modern Art Design Store in Hong Kong or Mainland China. “Our visitors will like creativity and culture and have sophisticated international tastes,” says Adrian, who estimates that most of K11 Musea’s visitors will be Hongkongers. “So we really needed our partners to embrace that as well—we needed them to be sophisticated, to have a sense of heritage, to respect culture, to have history but to still be creative and relevant.” Where possible, Adrian also wanted the brands to offer something that couldn’t be found anywhere else in the world. “David Gianotten and Rem Koolhaas’ studio, OMA, has designed a big coffee bar for % Arabica—it’s the best coffee in the world with two of the best architects, so there’s this interesting cross-pollination happening,” says Adrian. “Cartier is creating a new high-end museum-like space, which is new for them. Van Cleef & Arpels is opening the first outpost in Asia of L’école, their jewellery school, where they’ll teach people about jewellery and craftsmanship.” But Adrian insisted that these offerings weren’t gimmicky—they had to genuinely add value for visitors. “People talk about having experiences, but I don’t believe in experiences. The word experience is obsolete,” says Adrian. “People who come to K11 Musea want to learn things, they want to build their knowledge capital. An experience is fleeting—people come here to learn. I want people to come here, discover new things and be inspired.”
“I want to make the world a little different. I want to contribute to society” —Adrian Cheng
One of the many things Adrian wants visitors to K11 Musea to learn about is sustainability. The majority of the building’s shell is clad in a vertical garden packed with tropical greenery designed by P Landscape of Bangkok. Inside, rare plants and moss grow inside vivariums dotted along corridors. “K11 Musea has an urban nature discovery park with a beautiful butterfly garden, an urban farm and an aquarium of exotic fish,” says Adrian. “We want to teach visitors about being green. We want to teach people about growing your own food, about the butterflies going extinct because of disruption in the global food cycle, about exotic fish dying because of damage to coral reefs.” K11 Musea itself is leading by example. Rainwater harvesting provides all of the complex’s irrigation water, while a seawater-cooled ventilation and air-conditioning system reduces energy use.
K11 Musea also directly engages with its immediate environment—victoria Harbour. Adrian spent a sizeable amount of the project’s budget on redeveloping the waterfront Avenue of Stars and creating public walkways that run between the harbourfront and the rest of Tsim Sha Tsui. “I hope people can appreciate that I’ve always been sincerely trying to create and activate public spaces that are interesting,” says Adrian. “For the promenade I commissioned James Corner, who designed the High Line in New York, where he activated and transformed an old railway line into public space.” Outside K11 Musea, Corner has created an arching walkway that appears to float above the water, bringing visitors closer to the harbour than ever.
Art, design, architecture, food, fashion, sustainability—it seems almost too much to tackle in a single project, and suggests a deep, burning ambition to attempt something no one has tried before. “I don’t think I’m ambitious,” counters Adrian. “But I have resources, and I want to make the world a little different. I want to contribute to society. It’s very simple—it’s not about ambition, it’s about what society needs. We as a family have some sort of influence, so we’re trying to make a positive and sustainable impact.”
But can K11 Musea possibly achieve everything he hopes—will it really inspire people for the next 10, 20, 30 years? “That’s always the danger—will your vision be lasting?” says Adrian. “What you’re seeing now is already 10 years in the making, but the vision goes much further. It’s in the name itself, K11 Musea—a muse by the sea. It’s a place where people can find something new, something that inspires them—and I hope it will continue to do so for a long time.”