Cultural landmark set to rise in SAR
Hong Kong Palace Museum will house more than 900 treasures from Beijing, director says
The Hong Kong Palace Museum, a future cultural landmark of the special administrative region, will play a crucial role in art and cultural exchanges between China and the rest of the world, with a host of joint exhibitions that include exquisite art treasures, the museum director said on Oct 26.
“We will take over the building in December after the completion of the construction work in November, and the museum is set to open in July 2022,” Louis Ng Chi-wa said.
The information came during a media tour of the Hong Kong Palace Museum — the HK$3.5 billion ($450 million) project in the West Kowloon Cultural District — on Oct 26. The visit is one of the series of events that seek to highlight China’s engineering prowess and the beauty of Chinese architecture.
As part of the series of events, a Chinese-mainland delegation comprising the nation’s top engineering experts and media representatives began a six-day trip in Hong Kong on Oct 25.
Ng said the Hong Kong Palace Museum is expected to house more than 900 artifacts from the Beijing Palace Museum’s national treasures — 166 of which are first-class cultural relics of China — after the museum opens to the public.
“Our plan is that we will arrange exhibition halls, introduce some multimedia programs, and ensure we have a stabilized environment for exhibitions by April next year, and objects from the Palace Museum will be shipped to Hong Kong (from Beijing) in May,” Ng said.
Looking ahead, Ng said that the Hong Kong Palace Museum will enhance cooperation not only with museums on the Chinese mainland, but also with those in the rest of the world. The museum is the first cooperation project of the Palace Museum in Beijing outside the mainland.
Noting that the new museum will make promoting Chinese culture and history education in Hong Kong a priority, Ng said that the museum will have partnerships with schools and educational organizations to bring Chinese culture to different communities.
To showcase Chinese aesthetic characteristics, the main building of the museum adopted a large number of high-precision cantilever upsidedown structures to form a fair-faced concrete exterior wall with a slope of up to 1:3. The total area of the exterior wall is 11,000 square meters.
“Such a shape and scale is unique in the world, which also means this is extremely difficult to construct,” Wang Yong, assistant general manager of the Building Construction Department at China State Construction
Engineering (Hong Kong), told the media on Oct 26.
Behind such a challenging museum project, CSHK — the contractor of the project — has helped ensure the construction goes smoothly, despite the city being hard-hit over the past two years by the 2019 social unrest and the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We incorporated technology into the building’s construction process,” Wang said.
CSHK adopted advanced technology throughout the entire project
cycle to strengthen the construction’s quality and efficiency, as well as to improve the construction site’s safety and environment, Wang said. The tech includes building-information modeling, artificial intelligence management, augmented and virtual reality, and an intelligent construction site system, he added.
Wang also said he believes that after the museum opens its doors to the public, it will play a positive role by connecting China and the rest of the world through art and culture.