The Hong Kong Jockey Club is delighted to support the French May Arts Festival for the 14th consecutive year, serving as a Major Partner. This year’s festival features a diverse array of arts programmes and educational initiatives.

One of the key highlights is the opening programme, The Hong Kong Jockey Club Series: Picasso for Asia—A Conversation exhibition, which marks the first major exhibition of Pablo Picasso’s work in Hong Kong in over a decade and serves as one of the celebratory activities for the Club’s 140th anniversary. It is a major milestone, with masterpieces from the Musée national Picasso-Paris (MnPP) being shown alongside works from a museum collection in Asia for the first time, offering an unprecedented and unique perspective on the artist’s wide-reaching influence and what it means to be an artist in our time.

The exhibition presents a rich intercultural and intergenerational dialogue between over 60 masterpieces by Spanish artist Pablo Picasso (1881 – 1973) from MnPP, which holds the largest collection of works by Picasso in the world, and around 130 works by Asian and Asian-diasporic artists from the M+ Collections.

Furthermore, the Jockey Club Community Outreach and Arts Education Programmes provide guided tours and in-depth talks, ensuring that more people can enjoy the festival.

We commit to building an inclusive, creative and vibrant Hong Kong, where everyone can enjoy the benefits offered by cultural experiences and an improved quality of life through arts.

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.