The M+ Facade is the south face of the museum in West Kowloon, fitted with thousands of LEDs and described by M+ as one of the world’s largest media screens. Since 14 October 2026 it has been showing Winds of Hong Kong, a new commission by Refik Anadol, every night. It runs to 7 January 2027.
The source material is not imagery. It is wind.
What the work actually reads
Anadol’s piece draws on wind and environmental data gathered from publicly available sources in Hong Kong, and turns the Facade into what M+ calls an evolving data painting. The subject is specific rather than atmospheric-in-general: the work traces seasonal weather patterns and monsoon winds, and how those forces meet the built environment of a dense vertical city.
The curators put this plainly. Sunny Cheung, Curator, Design and Architecture, and Kate Gu, Associate Curator, Moving Image, describe a work in which “atmospheric phenomena become both medium and subject” — the monsoon winds treated as forces that shape the city’s rhythms and its infrastructure, not as weather happening nearby.
Anadol’s own framing is about perception rather than data. He says he wants viewers to “experience Hong Kong as a dynamic ecology of movement, energy, and transformation,” and hopes the work invites them to pause.
The series, and why the data matters
Winds of Hong Kong belongs to Anadol’s Winds of … series, which began in 2017 and is ongoing. The series’ operating premise is that data is a dynamic artistic material — something with behaviour and texture — rather than only numbers and measurements. On a screen this size, that premise gets tested in a way a gallery monitor cannot test it: the wind data has to carry a façade visible across a harbour.
The choice of publicly available sources is worth noticing. The work is not built on a proprietary sensor network or a commissioned instrument array. It reads what the city already publishes about its own air.
The framing M+ chose
This is where the commission gets more pointed than a weather visualisation sounds.
M+ presents the work as a response to growing public debate about the environmental impacts of advanced technologies, including the energy demands associated with generative AI. The museum’s framing asks whether “machine intelligence, when guided by artistic intention” can reveal information beyond human vision.
That is a genuine argument rather than a wall label, and it cuts both ways: a large-scale generative work made of LEDs is itself an energy consumer, and the institution has chosen to raise the subject rather than avoid it. Set against the environmental data the piece is built from, the question becomes whether the machine earns its draw.
There is a precedent in the sponsorship line. Julius Baer presents this commission, and David Shick, the firm’s Market Head Greater China Hong Kong and Branch Manager Hong Kong, notes they are “honoured to sponsor the M+ Facade commission for a second year.” The same sponsor backed Anadol’s 2023 installation Glacier Dreams, which addressed AI and climate change directly.
Suhanya Raffel, Museum Director at M+, positions the commission institutionally: “Refik Anadol’s practice reflects M+‘s commitment to innovation across art, technology, and contemporary visual culture.”
Practical
- Winds of Hong Kong: every night, 14 October 2026 – 7 January 2027
- M+ Facade, M+, West Kowloon Cultural District, Hong Kong
- Free to view from outside; visible across the harbour
- Commissioned by M+, presented by Julius Baer
M+ has not published nightly start and end times, nor the Facade’s exact LED count, so check the museum’s own page before travelling for a specific slot.
Sources
- M+ Facade unveils ‘Winds of Hong Kong’ by Refik Anadol — M+ press release
- Winds of Hong Kong — M+ Facade
- M+ Facade programme
- Refik Anadol to Unveil ‘Winds of Hong Kong’ Data Painting on M+ Facade — HENI
- Refik Anadol — Events