Of the 2.8m visitors who came to M+ in Hong Kong last year, its first full year of operation (it opened in 2021 but was closed for periods during the COVID-19 pandemic), Raffel chose to highlight to CNN the older women who use the grounds for group exercise each morning. “The museum is an extension of their lives,” the director said proudly. Those visitors (half of whom are tourists from mainland China; 30 percent are locals) make M+ more popular than Florence’s Uffizi Galleries and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, The Art Newspaper reported. Those who made it into the galleries would have enjoyed chief curator Chong’s programme, which included the first extensive retrospective of architect I.M. Pei, as well as shows celebrating Lee Mingwei, Zhang Peili, Haegue Yang and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, whose seminal video installation Primitive (2009) was shown in Hong Kong for the first time. Earlier this year it was reported that West Kowloon Cultural District, of which M+ is something of a flagship, faced a funding shortfall; the authority managed to secure government funding, but continues to look for steady private investment.