The Club is delighted to support the French May Arts Festival for the thirteenth year in which the Club’s Charities Trust is its Major Partner. This year’s festival features a wide range of arts programmes and educational initiatives that runs from March to June.

A special highlight of our support is The Hong Kong Jockey Club Series: Noir & Blanc—A Story of Photography exhibition, which is also the festival’s opening programme on photography. Guided tours and in-depth talks for the exhibition will be provided by the Jockey Club Community Outreach and Arts Education Programmes, allowing more people to enjoy the festival.

Other French May programmes include French Rendezvous@Tai Kwun: Möbius in May, an exploration of acrobatics by seeking out concepts of natural phenomena; and a series of live and online masterclasses, talks and workshops presented by French artists and performers.

The Club has a long-standing commitment to promoting arts, culture and heritage in Hong Kong. The Hong Kong Jockey Club Series: Noir & Blanc—A Story of Photography exhibition and the festival’s multi-art-form programmes aim to inspire creativity and enhance our city’s cultural richness and vitality.

As M+’s first exhibition dedicated to the medium of photography, this special exhibition examines black-and-white photography as a time-honoured medium of art by presenting more than 250 important photographs from Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF)’s collection, complemented by over thirty photographs from world-renowned the M+ Collections. With works dated from 1915 to 2019 in three thematic sections – ‘Aiming for Contrast’, ‘Light and Shadow’, and ‘Colour Chart’ – the exhibition explores the enduring aesthetics of black-and-white photography and offers different perspectives to understand black-and-white image-making over the course of more than a century.

BnF houses one of the largest and most important public collections of black-and-white photography in the world. This exhibition is the first major public presentation of the collection in Asia in such a large number and will feature over 170 internationally celebrated photographers. The exhibition also showcases eminent photographers and artists represented in the M+ Collections tracing the ways their practices transform this expressive artistic medium.

The exhibition is co-presented by the French May Arts Festival and M+, in collaboration with the BnF, and exclusively sponsored by The Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust.