The Dream of a Museum at Hong Kong's M+

At M+, the dream is the architectural grandeur of Herzog and de Meuron's central atrium: white paint and grey concrete bathed in the confluence of sunlight and cold fluorescent light. But beyond this space, flanked by ambiguous signage, is a completely different set of galleries, where split bamboo veneer-lined walls are bathed in a warm yellow hue.

An unwieldy pile of knotted black cotton ropes radiates from the coiled and bound pages of an open notebook in Hassan Sharif's Cotton Rope No.7 (2012), forming a dense network of nodes, lines, and frays, while Etel Adnan's Japanese accordion album Point Reyes n°2 California (1989) is filled with scribbles vaguely resembling Arabic text or titular landscape.

Every work speaks to an undecipherability in acts of conceptual abstraction not arrived at through European modernism but endemic to each creator's language and world, where the 'idea' binds with different material cultures. No linear genealogy or master narrative can be drawn. Just fluid trajectories that are rhizomic, non-hierarchical, and unruly. —[O]